The Gender Conundrum
Key psychoanalytic papers on the subject of femininity and masculinity
from the very different British, French and American perspectives are
brought together in this book for the first time. Indeed, three of the
French papers had not been translated into English before. An
introductory discussion of important theoretical differences, in particular
of the conception of the unconscious and psychic development, enables
the reader to overcome the barriers of international dialogue and really to
engage with the arguments. The papers are gathered around the central
issue of the interplay of body and psyche in psychoanalysis and by
examining this interplay Dana Breen offers a way forward in the
understanding of femininity. At the same time she shows how the
outspoken controversy over femininity has masked a more silent
revolution in the understanding of masculinity.
The Gender Conundrum is divided into four sections; the Oedipus
complex; the phallic question; the representation of the body; and
bisexuality. Papers included are by: M.Aisenstein, D.Bernstein, P.Blos,
D.Braunschweig and M.Fain, R.Britton, J.Chasseguet-Smirgel,
A.Gibeault, W.H.Gillespie, M.Glasser, R.R.Greenson, M.E.Laufer,
A.Limentani, J.McDougall and M.Montrelay.
Offering an international perspective, with introductions of exemplary
clarity, this collection of seminal papers fills a considerable gap in the
literature and provides a classic reference text for psychoanalysis and
gender studies.
Dana Breen is a Training Psychoanalyst in private practice and is
actively involved in the training organization of the British Institute of
Psycho-Analysis. She is Book Review Editor of the International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis. She was formerly a research fellow at the University of Sussex.
The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in association with the Institute
of Psycho-Analysis, London. Its purpose is to facilitate a greater and more widespread
appreciation of what psychoanalysis is really about and to provide a forum for increasing
mutual understanding between psychoanalysts and those working in other disciplines such
as history, linguistics, literature, medicine, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences.
It is intended that the titles selected for publication in the series should deepen and
develop psychoanalytic thinking and technique, contribute to psychoanalysis from outside
or contribute to other disciplines from a psychoanalytical perspective.
The Institute, together with the British Psycho-Analytical Society, runs a low-fee
psychoanalytic clinic, organizes lectures and scientific events concerned with
psychoanalysis, publishes the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, and runs the only
training course in the UK in psychoanalysis leading to membership of the International
Psychoanalytical Association—the body which preserves internationally agreed standards
of training, of professional entry, and of professional ethics and practice for psychoanalysis
as initiated and developed by Sigmund Freud. Distinguished members of the Institute
have included Michael Balint, Wilfred Bion, Ronald Fairbairn, Anna Freud, Ernest Jones,
Melanie Klein, John Rickman, and Donald Winnicott.
Volumes 1–11 in the series have been prepared under the general editorship of David
Tuckett, with Ronald Britton and Eglé Laufer as associate editors. Subsequent volumes
are under the general editorship of Elizabeth Bott Spillius, with, from Volume 17, Donald
Campbell, Michael Parsons, Rosine Jozef Perelberg and David Taylor as associate editors.
IN THE SAME SERIES
1 Impasse and Interpretation Herbert Rosenfeld
2 Psychoanalysis and Discourse Patrick Mahoney
3 The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men Marion Milner
4 The Riddle of Freud Estelle Roith
5 Thinking, Feeling, and Being Ignacio Matte-Blanco
6 The Theatre of the Dream Salomon Resnik
7 Melanie Klein Today: Volume 1, Mainly Theory Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius
8 Melanie Klein Today: Volume 2, Mainly Practice Edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius
9 Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph Edited by Michael
Feldman and Elizabeth Bott Spillius
10 About Children and Children-No-Longer: Collected Papers 1942–80 Paula Heimann.
Edited by Margret Tonnesmann
11 The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45 Edited by Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner
12 Dream, Phantasy and Art Hanna Segal
13 Psychic Experience and Problems of Technique Harold Stewart
14 Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion Edited by Robin Anderson
15 From Fetus to Child Alessandra Piontelli
16 A Psychoanalytic Theory of Infantile Experience: Conceptual and Clinical Reflections
E.Gaddini Edited by Adam Limentani
17 The Dream Discourse Today Edited and introduced by Sara Flanders
NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
18
General editor: Elizabeth Bott Spillius
The Gender
Conundrum
Contemporary Psychoanalytic
Perspectives on Femininity and
Masculinity
Edited and introduced by
DANA BREEN
HOVE AND NEW YORK
First published in 1993
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Brunner-Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 1993 General introduction and introductions to parts Dana Breen; Individual
chapters the authors or their estates
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Gender conundrum: psychoanalytic perspectives on femininity and
masculinity/edited by Dana Breen.
p. cm.—(New library of psychoanalysis: 18)
1. Sex differences (Psychology) 2. Femininity (Psychology)
3. Masculinity (Psychology) 4. Psychoanalysis. I. Breen, Dana.
II. Series.
BF175.5.S49G46 1993
155.3′3–dc20 92–37650
ISBN 0-203-35963-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-37219-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-09163-2 (Print Edition)
0-415-09164-0 (pbk)
Contents
Acknowledgements
General introduction
vii
1
Part One:The Oedipus complex
1
2
3
Introduction
43
Son and father
Peter Blos
49
The female Oedipus complex and the relationship to the body
M.Eglé Laufer
68
The missing link: parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex
Ronald Britton
83
Part Two:The phallic question
Introduction
4
5
6
99
Freud and female sexuality: the consideration of some blind
spots in the exploration of the ‘dark continent’
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
107
Concepts of vaginal orgasm
W.H.Gillespie
127
The phallic shadow
Denise Braunschweig and Michel Fain
132
vi THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
7
8
Inquiry into femininity
Michèle Montrelay
147
On the feminine and the masculine: afterthoughts on
Jacqueline Cosnier’s book, Destins de la féminité
Alain Gibeault
168
Part Three:The representation of the body
9
10
Introduction
187
Female genital anxieties, conflicts and typical mastery modes
Doris Bernstein
191
‘The weak spot’—some observations on male sexuality
Mervin Glasser
215
Part Four:Bisexuality
11
Introduction
234
The dead father: on early psychic trauma and its relation to
disturbance in sexual identity and in creative activity
Joyce McDougall
236
12
Dis-identifying from mother: its special importance for the boy
Ralph R.Greenson
260
13
Clinical notes on the identification with the little girl
Marilia Aisenstein
267
To the limits of male heterosexuality: the vagina-man
Adam Limentani
275
Bibliography
Name index
Subject index
287
299
303
14
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank David Tuckett, who invited me to work on this book
when he was general editor of the series. It gave me the impetus to
develop my ideas. Elizabeth Bott Spillius took over the series and I am
grateful for the generous time and encouragement she gave me
throughout the numerous drafts. I also want to thank Juliet Mitchell
Rossdale, Susan Lipshitz Phillips and Steven Ablon for their useful
comments and Thomas Elsaesser for his help with the German nuances
of Freud’s text.
I want to thank Jill Duncan for her patience with my unending
requests for obscure books and papers.
I am grateful to my husband Ian and my daughter Sasha and my son
Noah who, as always, have been supportive of my work and to Noah for
helping to reorganize my bibliography.
I would also like to thank the following for their kind permission to
reproduce copyright material: The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
for ‘Freud and female sexuality’ vol. 57 (1976), J.Chasseguet-Smirgel;
‘Concepts of vaginal orgasm’, vol. 50 (1969), W.H.Gillespie; ‘Female
genital anxieties, conflicts and typical mastery modes’, vol. 71 (1990),
D.Bernstein; ‘“The weak spot”, some observations on male sexuality’,
vol. 50 (1985), M.Glasser; ‘The dead father: on early psychic trauma and
its relation to disturbance in sexual identity and in creative activity’, vol.
70 (1989), J.McDougall; and ‘Dis-identifying from mother: its special
importance for the boy’, vol. 49 (1968), R.Greenson; The Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association for ‘Son and father’, vol. 32 (1984),
P.Blos; The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child for ‘The female Oedipus
complex and the relationship to the body’, vol. 41 (1988), M.E.Laufer;
Les Cahiers du Centre de Psychoanalyse et de Psychothérapie for ‘Du Feminin
et du Masculin’, Cahiers no. 16–17 (1988), A.Gibeault, and ‘Notes
cliniques sur une identification à la petite fille’, Cahiers no. 8 (1984)
M.Aisenstein; Karnac and the Melanie Klein Trust for ‘The missing link:
parental sexuality’, R.Britton in The Oedipus Complex Today, Clinical
viii THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Implications (1989); Payot for ‘L’ombre phallique’ in Eros et Thanatos
(1971), D.Braunschweig and M.Fain; Editions de Minuit for ‘Recherches
sur la féminité’ (1978); M.Montrelay and Parveen Adams for her
translation of the paper, and Psichiatria e Psicoterapia Analitica for ‘To the
limits of heterosexuality: the vagina-man’, vol. 2 (1984), A.Limentani. I
want to thank Rachel Bowlby for her translation of ‘The phallic
shadow’, ‘On the feminine and the masculine: afterthoughts on
Jacqueline Cosnier’s book, Destins de la féminité’ and ‘Clinical notes on
the identification with the little girl’.
Above all, I am indebted to all the authors for allowing me to reprint
their papers.
General introduction
It is important to understand clearly that the concepts of ‘masculine’
and ‘feminine’, whose meaning seems so unambiguous to ordinary
people, are amongst the most confused that occur in science.
(Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality,
1905 footnote, 1915, SE 7, p. 219)
I am accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as a process in
which four individuals are involved.
(Freud, Letters, 1899, J.Masson (ed.))
It is part of the complexity of Freud’s work that his theory has been seen
by some as ascribing an inescapable biological destiny to man and
woman, while others have understood him to uphold the revolutionary
belief that, psychologically speaking, we are not born man or woman,
and that masculinity and femininity are constructed over a period of time
and are relatively independent of biological sex.
I believe that this duality is there in Freud’s work not because he was
confused or changed his mind or developed his ideas, but because an
inherent tension exists at the heart of the matter, which is why this
opposition is not going away and why the debate is still alive half a
century after his death.
It is in relation to women that the disjunction between biology and
psychology is greatest in Freudian theory, and the debate on female
sexuality therefore comes to embody that tension. There has been an
attempt to resolve the ‘mystery’ of woman by grounding female sexuality
in a biological perspective or, on the contrary, by pulling it right out of
this and into a linguistic approach. I believe that the way forward is to
make positive use of this very tension and duality, which philosophers
refer to as ‘essence’ and ‘existence’.
This Introduction will be largely guided by my argument of this
general thesis while some other aspects of the subject, as well as some of
1
2 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
the historical details, are left to the introductions to the individual parts of
the book. For the sake of simplicity only, I have decided to deal with
men and women separately, although the issues are intimately linked.
Cultural traditions have influenced perspectives, with the Anglo-Saxon
tradition being more empirical and developmental and more tied to a
biological perspective, and French culture opting for a more
philosophical approach. While French psychoanalysis has developed
within the intelligentsia of academia, with its rich cross-fertilization of
disciplines and its brilliance at grasping the theoretical issues, British
psychoanalysis has maintained a very British suspiciousness of
‘intellectuality’ and an insularity which has enabled it to develop a finesse
for clinical and technical understanding. In the United States, the cultural
ambiance has been different. Psychoanalysis there has gone in two
opposite directions: a biological direction, fostered by the fact that
psychoanalysis has been a branch of medicine (while in Europe
psychoanalysis was largely frowned upon until recently in medical
circles); and a social direction, encouraged by the vast possibilities for
social psychological and developmental studies in the universities and
promoted by the American ideals of social equality and social adjustment,
sometimes at the expense of the concept of the unconscious.
Discourse across cultural barriers is difficult, if not impossible, when
the differences in premises, theories and concepts are not understood,
and I will discuss some important differences later on in this Introduction.
Mainly about women
Bifocality in Freud’s understanding of femininity
For Freud, masculinity and femininity are formed from the moment of
recognition of genital difference. It is more than just the perception of
the difference, it is the fact that the perception suddenly takes on
meaning. The meaning for the boy is that the penis can be absent and
therefore that his can be lost; the meaning for the girl is that she has
something missing. The threat of loss for the boy is linked to the
prohibition of incest. For the girl there is no threat since she has nothing
to lose. Hence the recognition of genital difference engenders a
differential development in boy and girl. The ‘castration complex’ refers
to the whole constellation of mental processes surrounding this
recognition whichinitiates the distinction between the sexes. For the girl
Freud prefers to use the concept of ‘penis envy’ since she need not fear
castration. It is this envy which will turn her away from her mother,
whom she makes responsible for her lack, and towards her father in her
search for what she lacks; hence it initiates her Oedipus complex.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 3
But masculine and feminine for Freud are not simply a reference to
the development of boy and girl. They refer to the way in which each
individual deals with that recognition of difference. If a girl maintains the
phantasy belief that she possesses a penis (thanks to the ego’s capacity to
split), then her development will be masculine and not feminine (the
‘masculinity complex’). A boy’s development will be feminine if his fear
of castration is so great that he ‘renounces’ his penis in phantasy. This has
not always been clearly understood and has lead to confusions and
misrepresentations. What Freud describes as ‘feminine’ has often been
taken to mean ‘characteristic of women’, which is not so. A case in point
is his notion of ‘feminine masochism’, which he specifically discusses in
relation to men.
Freud’s theory disputes the naturalness of the heterosexual drive.
It would be a solution of ideal simplicity if we could suppose that
from a particular age onwards the elementary influence of the mutual
attraction between the sexes makes itself felt and impels the small
woman towards men, while the same law allows the boy to continue
with his mother.
(Freud 1933:119)
This is clearest in the case of the girl for whom heterosexuality is
described as the end result of a long psychological process, not a
biological one. Her heterosexuality only develops after a homosexual
phase, in the wake of disappointment.
Freud’s theory has been seen by some as describing an inescapable
biological destiny to man. In fact the bedrock Freud describes is more
anatomical than biological. It is anatomy which determines the cataclysm
which initiates the psychological reorganization shaping masculinity and
femininity. Anatomy is a given, and each sex has to grapple with the
particular significance it has in their case. What is not given is what each
individual makes of this anatomy. And what each individual makes of his
or her anatomy will influence the course of his or her psychosexuality,
his or her choice of object as homosexual or heterosexual (and this can
be even more complicated in that the object may be of one anatomical
sex but treated as if of the other sex). For Freud there is no natural
sexuality, it is always psychosexuality, always a construction relatively
independent of biology. If ‘anatomy is destiny’, it means that sexual
difference has inevitably to be reckoned with. The anatomical difference,
not in itselfbut through the meaning it takes on, will shape object
relations. The objection which has been voiced has come not so much
from the fact that anatomy is destiny as such—there is no objection to
this destiny in men—but because of Freud’s suggestion that the female
4 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
anatomy signifies a lack to her, that the experience of lack is her destiny.
This has been interpreted as meaning that women are lacking.
Biology does have a role in the Freudian model of development
through the phylogenetic unfolding of organizations (oral, anal, phallic).
There is also a certain determinism in the inevitable advent of the
Oedipus complex. His use of the myth of Oedipus conveys the
inescapability of this drama, the fact that it transcends individual
experience. Oedipus is responding to a force greater than himself. ‘It was
Apollo! He brought this pain, this suffering to me. But it was my own
hand that struck the blow. Not his’ (Sophocles). Freud writes, ‘these
wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by
Nature’ (Freud 1900; italics mine). In Freud’s account it is only for the
boy that there is a ‘natural’ phylogenetically determined entry into the
structure of interpersonal relationships he calls the Oedipus complex,
even if it is the prohibition of incest more than his ‘natural’ wishes which
mark his masculine development. In the case of the girl, a dual
perspective is clearest: her body is her destiny, but her psychosexuality
does not simply parallel her biological destiny.
Freud often cautioned against the assumed meaning of the concepts of
masculine and feminine which he thought were ‘amongst the most
confused that occur in science’. In particular, he warned against equating
active with masculine and passive with feminine: ‘the contrast between
the sexes fades away into one between activity and passivity, in which we
far too readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with
femaleness’ (Freud 1930:106). He also writes that
psycho-analysis cannot elucidate the intrinsic nature of what in
conventional or in biological phraseology is termed ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’: it simply takes over the two concepts and makes them the
foundation of its work. When we attempt to reduce them further, we
find masculinity vanishing into activity and femininity into passivity,
and that does not tell us enough.
(Freud 1920:171)
The German verb Verblassen in the first quotation and Verflüchtigen in the
second (translated as ‘fades away’ and ‘vanishes’) more clearly than the
English translation conveys the idea that as one tries to grasp the nature
of masculinity and femininity, one finds that it gets out of focus, that one
cannot grasp it. We can assume that Freud is making a point here about
the nature of the connection between the biological and
thepsychological, that while the biological differences can be easily
grasped, as one looks from the point of view of psychoanalysis one can
no longer grasp them, but yet they are not unrelated images either. The
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 5
moment of ‘evaporation’ (Verflüchtigen) is the moment when the two
perspectives are out of focus because they do not completely overlap.
This out-of-focusness most clearly for me expresses the duality in Freud’s
position; body and mind are connected, but not completely, and the
disjunction between them is difficult to grasp. A concept which is equally
imbued with this bifocal vision and elusive to the grasp is Freud’s notion
of bisexuality. It is a biological concept on the one hand (‘human nature
is inherently bisexual’), while he also considers bisexuality in terms of
identification or Oedipal positions. Women he considers to be more
bisexual then men because of the initial homosexual phase of attachment.
The early debate over the place of the biological in femininity
The controversy over the subject of female sexuality which broke out in
the 1920s following Freud’s paper on the ‘Anatomical distinction
between the sexes’ (1925) and which continues implicitly or explicitly to
this day, rests on this relationship of mind and body. For Freud’s opponents
—Horney, Klein and Jones—there is a biological drive which propels the
girl in a heterosexual direction and her female anatomy is known to her
in its positive aspects rather than experienced simply as a lack; penis envy
expresses the desire to take the penis into herself in a feminine way or
else it is a secondary defence against femininity or the result of
interpersonal frustrations. Mind and body are hence, for them, very
closely connected, unless psychopathological reactions intervene.
Prompted by women analysts,1 Freud’s researches into the ‘dark
continent’ led him to discover the fundamental importance of the girl’s
early relationship to her mother, a phase of such importance that he
compared it to the discovery of a hidden civilization, the discovery of
which transformed the understanding of analytic discourse. While Van
Ophuijsen, writing in 1917 before the discovery of that early phase, was
able to write confidently
it will be agreed that there can be no misunderstanding about this
statement of hers [this woman patient]: ‘Often when I am restless and
don’t know what to do with myself I have a feeling that I would like
to ask my mother to give me something that she cannot give me’.
(1924:40)
the discovery and exploration of the early relationship to the mother led
to a more complex picture where it is far more than the wish to be given
a penis which the girl craves from her mother. By 1940 it had long been
generally accepted that ‘the girl traverses a long and complicated route
before entering the Oedipus complex. Indeed during the examination of
6 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
the pre-Oedipal phenomena we become uncertain as to the comparative
importance of pre-Oedipal and Oedipal phenomena in feminine
development’ (Brunswick 1940:233). Freud’s choice of imagery—the
discovery of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization hidden behind the
Greek one—must attest to how much this phase came as a surprise but
especially how he felt it had an all-encompassing logic of its own.
Nevertheless, he had already stated that the little girl started off as a little
man in her strivings towards her mother; what he now adds and which
comes as a surprise is how important, long-lasting and complex this early
relationship is and how fundamental it is to the understanding of female
sexuality. What comes as a surprise is that the ‘homosexual’ relationship
for the girl is of such structuring importance and distinct from, though
connected to, the subsequent heterosexual relationship. However, this
discovery of the importance of the early phase of the girl’s attachment to
the mother in no way changed Freud’s view on the formation of femininity.
Psychoanalysts on both sides of the controversy accepted the
importance of this early phase and their work developed its
understanding. What differed was whether this phase was to be seen as
essentially a feminine or a masculine phase, whether the girl’s sexuality at
this time was thought to be receptive or phallic, whether her
psychosexuality follows her biological reality. This is not questioned for
the boy, since psychosexual and biological tally.
Helene Deutsch, Lampl-de Groot and Marie Bonaparte took up
Freud’s view, but sometimes the subtlety of his position was lost.
Whereas he was mainly following the consequences of the recognition of
sexual difference on psychosexual development in men and women, they
looked for set characteristics in women and a set notion of femininity. Lamplde Groot, for instance, writes (1933):
The purely feminine orientation of the woman to the man leaves no
place for activity. Feminine love is passive, a narcissistic process the
purely feminine woman does not love, she lets herself be loved. […] It
is well known that many women also retain some of this activity in
their relations to men and love them with real object love, that is,
with ‘masculinity’.
(Lampl-de Groot 1985:27–8)
Similarly, while Freud described ‘feminine masochism’ in both men and
women, referring to a particular phantasy of the child in relation to the
father, these authors speak of masochism as a characteristic of
femalesexuality. For Deutsch, the active libido linked with the clitoris is
transformed into masochism and the wish to be castrated by the father,
with childbirth as the ultimate gratification of the erotic instinct and the
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 7
acme of masochistic pleasure. Bonaparte states that coitus itself is a
masochistic pleasure (1953).
It did Freud a disservice that these ideas have often been taken to be
his ideas. In fact, Freud’s theory is one which is concerned more with
movement (development of object relationships and defensive
manoeuvres) than categorizations. While Freud was grappling with the outof-focusness of femininity and masculinity, and with their vicissitudes
following the discovery of sexual difference, other psychoanalysts were
now concerned with the female character. Juliet Mitchell, in Mitchell
and Rose (1982) points out that when the ‘Freud-Jones’ controversy
began, whatever the position, ‘the issue subtly shifts from what
distinguishes the sexes to what has each sex got of value that belongs to it
alone’, and therefore there is an inevitable return to the biological
explanation, from which Freud had deliberately departed.
Freud’s last paper devoted to femininity, Lecture 33 in New Introductory
Lectures (1933) nevertheless clearly encompasses again the bifocality in his
thinking. He states on the one hand that ‘psychoanalysis does not try to
describe what a woman is…but sets about enquiring how she comes into
being’. On the other hand, he explains the masculinity complex in girls
by referring to the constitutionally greater activity of men and wave of
passivity of women:
We can only suppose that it is a constitutional factor, a greater amount
of activity, such as is ordinarily characteristic of a male. However that
may be, the essence of this process is that at this point in development
the wave of passivity is avoided which opens the way to the turn
towards femininity.
(Freud 1933:130)
The study of pre-Oedipal phenomena by psychoanalysts on both sides of
the controversy did, however, further the understanding of women, in
particular the role of oral (Deutsch 1946; Sachs 1929; Brierley 1936) and
anal (Pfeiffer 1972; Brierley 1936) components, and the central
importance of maternity in the psychology of women (Deutsch 1946).
The widening gap between perspectives after the 1960s
Interest in female sexuality took a back seat from the mid-1930s for a few
decades; maybe the debate had reached a stalemate and could gono
further at this point; maybe a preoccupation with world events took
people’s minds in other directions, to aggression and the death instinct.
Certainly it was a Zeitgeist which brought it back to the surface in the
1960s along with the general questioning of social structures and
8 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
prejudices in society at large and with the spread of the feminist
movement. This movement had an impact on the standing of
psychoanalysis itself, though not operating in a uniform direction. While
American culture had long before eagerly adopted psychoanalysis,
something Freud had been suspicious of (‘they don’t realize that I am
bringing them the plague’), now American feminists turned against
psychoanalysis, because they believed it condoned social structures and
described women as inferior. Quite the opposite occurred in France,
where French culture had been staunchly anti-psychoanalytic until the
May 1968 revolution (except in certain circles; in particular, the group of
surrealists to which Lacan associated himself); people suddenly, feminists
and Marxists included, turned to psychoanalysis—via Lacan’s
interpretation of Freud—for the answers to their questions. The
bifocality of Freud’s theory had been split again, with the Americans
taking up the determining effect of anatomy, the French, in a large part,
concentrating on the independence of the psychological construction of
femininity from the biological path. Some American feminists—
Chodorow (1989), Jean Baker Miller (1976), Dinnerstein (1976)—later
turned back to psychoanalysis in the 1970s, in this case to a social
interpretation of Freud, in what is referred to as ‘psychoanalytic feminism’.
Within France a split also occurred, with only some psychoanalysts
espousing Lacan’s ideas. The crux of Lacan’s interpretation of Freud and
questioning of psychoanalytic developments revolved around the place of
the body and biology in psychoanalysis, and femininity was again an
important area of debate since it is always woman who comes to embody
that question, since it is female sexuality which for Freud departs from
the straight biological path.
British psychoanalysts, and in particular Kleinians, were alone in never
really regaining much of an interest in the subject in the 1960s or after.
Klein herself last wrote about femininity in 1945 and showed no interest
in the subject after that. Her description of an early femininity and
natural heterosexual drive and of the essentially defensive nature of penis
envy and the phallic phase, though not held by all, is not openly
challenged either, within the British Society. I believe that this is because
the interest of many psychoanalysts (in particular Kleinian) in the British
Society has shifted away from sexuality to separation anxiety and the
states and defences this anxiety leads to. Nevertheless, there are some
important papers written on the subject after the 1960s by British
psychoanalysts and it is noteworthy that they are all non-Kleinian:
Gillespie (1969), Balint (1973), Burgner and Edgcumbe (1975), Mitchell
in Mitchell and Rose (1982), Laufer (1982, 1986).2
The returning interest in female sexuality in France and the United
States is reflected in the publication of a number of important books and
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 9
papers in the sixties and early seventies: Chasseguet-Smirgel’s collection,
Recherches psychoanalytiques nouvelles sur la sexualité feminine was published
in France in 1964 and in the English language in 1970; Sherfey’s lengthy
paper on female sexuality, based on the work of Masters and Johnston,
was published in 1966 in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical
Association followed by a number of discussion papers. Lacan presented a
paper on femininity, ‘Guiding remarks for a congress on feminine
sexuality’, at a Congress on Feminine Sexuality in 1960. In 1976 the
American Psychoanalytic Association devoted to female sexuality a
special supplement edited by Harold Blum.
In France the old debate of the 1920s was being revived in a new
register. Both sides claimed their faithfulness to Freud, ChasseguetSmirgel wishing to ‘re-examine the theories of female sexuality using the
Freudian approach to the unconscious’, Lacan claiming a ‘return to
Freud’. The discussion was more sophisticated and elaborated, but the
main underlying dimension of the earlier controversy remained present
with the authors of the Chasseguet-Smirgel book assuming an early
awareness of the male and female genital organs ‘virtually from the
beginning’, while Lacan’s work rested on the theory of phallic monism.
Chasseguet-Smirgel suggested that the theoretical differences of the early
debate had been left behind or minimized in order not to disrupt the
psychoanalytic movement while it was still becoming established and that
the time at which this attitude was important had now gone. ‘The
vitality of any doctrine depends on the possibility of rethinking certain
aspects without disrupting the whole structure’ (1981:3). The key
concepts from the early debate are re-examined throughout the papers in
her book. Penis envy, the cornerstone of the debate, is understood by all
the authors of this collection not as primary and the initiator of
femininity, as it was for Freud, but as a defence, and a number of
different defensive functions are suggested: the wish for a penis as a
protection from a dangerous penis (Luquet-Parat) and as a protection
from the all-controlling anal mother or the devouring oral mother
(McDougall, Chasseguet-Smirgel), and penis envy as a disguise against
rivalry with women or unfulfilled desire in relation to the mother
(McDougall, Torok). The wish for a penis is also seen as expressing the
wish to repair the mother and remain the object of her desire (McDougall).
Narcissism and masochism are considered from the point of view of
object relations. Grunberger gives a different origin to the importance of
narcissism in feminine development, which Freud and Lampl-de
Grootattributed to compensation for the lack of a penis. He explains it
from the point of view of the mother-daughter relationship, which he
believes to be particularly frustrating for the girl because the mother is
only a substitute for a truly adequate sexual object. Female narcissism is
10 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
the attempt to make up for the maternal deficiency. Because of this
deficiency, Grunberger writes, the girl will also immediately and blindly
choose her father as ego-ideal and libidinal object. The construction of
an ideal image of the father while she despises the pre-genital satisfactions
provided by the mother explains, he believes, the peculiar survival of her
manifest Oedipal attachment and her tendency to dichotomize between
an ideal Oedipal love and the pre-Oedipal attachment “which is opposed
to it.
If the vagina is not known by little girls, Chasseguet-Smirgel suggests,
it is because of an ‘incorporation-guilt’ which forbids the erotic cathexis
of the vagina and restricts pleasure to the clitoris only. She suggests that a
split occurs at the time of the change of object so that the aggressive
instincts in relation to the father will be repressed and counter-cathected,
resulting in a ‘specifically feminine form of guilt attached to the
analsadistic component of sexuality’ (1981:97). In particular, guilt is
connected with the ‘basically feminine wish to incorporate the paternal
penis, which invariably includes the anal-sadistic instinctual components’
(1981:102). This repression will have consequences for women’s
psychosexual development and will interfere with achievement in fields
that take on an unconscious phallic significance. Female masochism is
linked to this guilt.
In the renewed debate of the 1960s it is only Lacan and his followers
who go back to the ‘Freud’ side of the Freud-Jones debate on female
sexuality, to phallic monism and the central place given to castration. His
concern is to pursue that aspect of Freud’s thinking which wants to keep
psychoanalysis separate from biology. His is a total theoretical model
within which both masculinity and femininity take their place; his views
on femininity can only be understood within an understanding of this
model. Lacan says that he is returning to the Freud of The Interpretation of
Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Freud of the ‘talking
cure’, which means a return to language as central in psychoanalysis.
This, in fact, also means a return to the Freud of the period before his
discovery of the importance of pre-Oedipal phenomena. For his
understanding of femininity he goes back to Some Psychical Consequences of
the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes. Lacan’s innovation is to make
use of structural linguistics (in particular, Ferdinand de Saussure’s work)
for a re-reading of the texts, and in this sense it is as much a ‘reinvention
of Freud’ (Turkle) as a return to Freud. He suggests that ‘the unconscious
is structured as a language’ with its different laws governing it, and
moreover that the unconscious is intimately connected with language
and with the father as representative of the moment of rupture of the
union between mother and child, the moment of ‘entry into culture’
through language, through the third person. The father introduces the
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 11
law of the language system, and it is then that the child becomes a
subject. The ‘law of the phallus’ is not a reference to an anatomical organ
or a particular person but a metaphor which signifies the separation of
human beings from their object of desire. It refers to a lack in both girl
and boy.
Lacan thought it was a misunderstanding of Freud to look for the
subject’s truth beyond language, and this is what makes his perspective
different from the others. Ferdinand de Saussure suggested that the study
of language could not be done purely from a ‘diachronic’—that is, from a
historical—point of view, but necessitated a ‘synchronic’ approach—that
is, a structural, ahistorical approach which looks for internal laws and
which will bring to light some radically new properties of language.
Lacan applied this structuralist approach to the field of psychoanalysis.
What concerns us here is that in placing his perspective firmly within a
linguistic point of view, Lacan was removing it both from the genetic
historical perspective and from a biological approach. Hence, for him,
psychoanalytically speaking, the body does not count, and human
psychology is constituted by language. Lacan is taking to its extreme that
aspect of Freud’s work which upholds that masculinity and femininity are
independent of biological reality, that they are constructed from the
moment of recognition of sexual difference. For him, because there is no
reality outside language, not only does he discard the role of the body
but he also discards the role of early phenomena.3 Lacan’s return to
Freud is a return to that Freud who wants to keep psychoanalysis separate
from biology and within the area of mental representation, and for
whom there is no such thing as a pre-given male or female subject. Lacan
wanted to re-orientate psychoanalysis to the study of how the human
subject is constructed and how this happens within the terms of language—
that is, from a logic which comes from outside the individual.
Lacan questions the assumption of a natural heterosexual drive and
puts forward the idea that a being conceptualizes itself from the position
of the Other. For him there is no essence of femininity or masculinity,
and an account of masculine and feminine sexuality can only be within
the terms of language. The unconscious severs the subject from any
unmediated relation to the body; that is, for the human subject enmeshed
in the linguistic system, there is no one-to-one relationship between the
body and the construction of the self as masculine or feminine. The
‘feminine’ does not exist as an entity in itself but only as a division in
language; feminine is always opposed to masculine and in the linguistic
system ‘feminine’ refers to the negative pole, to ‘lack’ and to ‘the Other’.
Feminine mystery is no longer understood as Freud’s own difficulties
with femininity, as some have suggested, but is part of the feminine. The
question of ‘feminine mystery’ comes to be embodied in the woman
12 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
through the question: ‘What does a woman want?’ Castration refers to
the symbolic representation of lack, since there is nothing missing in
reality. Jacqueline Rose, in Mitchell and Rose (1982) warns that
psychoanalysis does not produce that definition (of feminine as lack) but
only gives an account of how that definition comes to be. This is a
warning against confusing the purpose of the theory with what the
theory is describing.
Indeed, Freud’s notion of the role of ‘penis envy’ in femininity has
been taken as denigrating to women and as if he were claiming by it their
actual inferiority. It is not Lacan’s (or Freud’s) theory which is
phallocentric, but what they have brought to light is the phallocentrism
in linguistic structures and hence in the construction of masculinity and
femininity which the child takes on when he becomes a subject through
becoming a speaking being. I would say that if phallocentrism exists, it is
more in stopping short of looking for a specific feminine experience than
in describing the role of the experience of lack in the feminine unconscious.
By separating psychoanalysis radically from biology through the
adoption of a linguistic approach, Lacan’s theory simplifies the bifocality
Freud thought was difficult to grasp (even if Lacan’s writing is difficult to
grasp), but in so doing something gets lost. I will come back to this later.
In the United States psychoanalysis took the opposite direction, with
the body taking centre stage. Masters and Johnson made a physiological
study of the female orgasm in an attempt finally to resolve the feminine
mystery, and Mary Jane Sherfey gave the findings psychoanalytic backing.
Masters and Johnson found that the clitoris is always involved in orgasm,
whatever the source of stimulation and that ‘the female’s physiologic
responses to effective sexual stimulation…develop with consistency
regardless of the source of the psychic or physical sexual stimulation’
(quoted in Sherfey 1966:254). Sherfey suggested a revision of Freudian
theory in the the light of the findings, in particular his clitoral-vaginal
transfer theory, because ‘it is a physical impossibility to separate the
clitoral from the vaginal orgasm as demanded by psychoanalytic theory’
(1966:78). She suggested a revision of concepts using the findings of
modern embryology which show that in the first weeks all embryos are
morphologically female. She also suggested from the work of Masters and
Johnson on the female’s capacity for multiple orgasms, each creating
more tension, that ‘the human female is sexually insatiable in the
presence of the highest degrees of sexual satiation and it is only culture
which restricts her behaviour’.
Sherfey’s work takes no account of unconscious meanings and
representations (or even conscious psychological reactions) and as such
has been criticized (Kestenberg 1968; Keiser 1968). It has also been
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 13
criticized for ignoring the role of adult integration as an end result of
progressive development (Kestenberg 1968; Benedek 1968).
It is clear from the Masters-Johnson data that female orgasm, as
defined by them, depends on previous training…. The inaccessibility
of the vagina in childhood permits only limited priming of this organ,
while the external genitalia are more intensely libidinized until the
onset of menses. Freud’s transfer theory is based on these considerations.
(Judith Kestenberg 1968:419)
Even the physiological conclusions are found inadequate:
Because of their special technique of investigation, Masters and
Johnson may not be able to detect why women find deep penetration
essential for the development of adult orgastic fulfilment. This depends
not only on the contractions of the orgastic platform but also on a
more feminine mode of vaginal functioning: the spreading intense
sensations which arise from rhythms of tension and release in the
unstriated vaginal muscles and those in the circumvaginal plexus—an
inner activity which need not express itself in visible changes.
(Benedek 1968:420)
Therese Benedek also believes, as had Deutsch before her, that a
woman’s sexual identity is invested more in her aspiration to bear
children and be a mother than in orgasm.
Sherfey’s paper was taken up more sympathetically by Gillespie in
Britain than it had been in the United States:
in view of what we have learned from Masters and Johnson, we
should reconsider very carefully the question whether clitoral
excitation is necessarily associated with the urge to penetrate and act
the male; may not clitoral excitation on the contrary lead to the wish
to be penetrated in order to satisfy its proper erotic aim in the
physiological manner that has been described? In the former case,
penis envy indeed seems an inevitable and therefore normal
consequence of anatomy; but in the latter case penis desire, i.e. the
desire to be penetrated and so stimulated both vaginally and clitorally,
is the outcome to be expected in a normal female psychosexual
development.
(Gillespie 1969:497)
Moustafa Safouan (1976), a follower of Lacan, states that the transfer
from clitoridal to vaginal orgasm is a mythical idea of femininity and that
14 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
what is important from the psychoanalytic point of view is not the
transformation of clitoridal to vaginal but of auto-erotic libido into object
libido (a point also made by Grunberger).
In this whole debate there is often a shift of ground to adult sexuality.
It was not Freud’s contention that the clitoris is not involved in adult
femininity; indeed it is the ‘pine shavings [which] can be kindled in order
to set a log of harder wood on fire’ (1905). What he is positing is the
central role of the clitoris in pre-Oedipal sexuality and its accompanying
active impulses. The wish to be penetrated and the recognition of the
vagina will occur only subsequently.
Masters and Johnson’s work took to extremes the myth that quantified
physiological investigation will throw light on the mystery of the ‘dark
continent’. The answer can only lie in the unconscious meaning
attributed by each individual to the clitoris as organ of masculinity or of
femininity. It has to be accepted that advances in biological and
physiological knowledge have not and cannot resolve the mystery—
because this mystery represents the unknowable of human existence, of
man’s origins, of the non-rational, and because psychology goes beyond
the purely physiological. Nevertheless the work has had, in spite of its
limitations, an—often silent—influence on psychoanalytic thinking about
female sexuality and helped to counteract a stereotyped image of ‘the
feminine woman’ proposed by some of Freud’s followers (though not by
Freud himself).
Following a spurt of papers in the United States on the female orgasm,
interest in the types and nature of this orgasm receded in the light of a
move away from a concern with drives in psychoanalytic theory
generally, replaced by a greater focus on object relations in the
understanding of human development and unconscious structures.
In 1976, six years after the translation of Chasseguet-Smirgel’s book in
English, and ten years after Sherfey’s paper, a special issue of the Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Association edited by Blum, was devoted to
female sexuality. The key concepts of the original debate of the 1920s are
here too reconsidered, in particular the age-old, thorny question of ‘penis
envy’. While Freud saw penis envy as initiating feminine development
and hence central, most of these authors view penis envy as secondary in
importance in the development of femininity. While the authors of
Chasseguet-Smirgel’s book considered the defensive aspects of penis
envy, the authors of the Blum collection, although they do propose some
defensive aspects (for instance, Lerner) for the most part consider penis
envy to occur ‘naturally’; they believe it, however, to be an impediment to
femininity rather than initiating femininity as in the classical theory
(Blum; Parens et al.). Its importance and specificity is also reduced by
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 15
seeing it as a way of representing more general narcissistic injuries
(Grossman and Stewart).
Galenson and Roiphe stand out from the other authors of the
American collection in that they believe that penis envy and the feminine
castration complex exert crucial influences upon feminine development.
However, in contradistinction to Freud, for whom the castration
complex initiates femininity, they see the castration complex as shaping
an already developing sense of femininity stemming from early bodily
and affective experiences with both parents. From their direct
observational studies they come to the view that patterns of sensuous
interaction of mother and child involve the genital zone from the very
beginning of life, not only in the course of the mother’s fondling and
bodily ministrations and during feeding, but also in connection with
transmitted pressure and excitation from the adjacent anal and urinary
areas. They talk about ‘a true early genital phase’ which precedes the phallicOedipal phase (Galenson and Roiphe 1976:34).
There is a renewed interest in the role of early vaginal sensations by all
the authors of the Blum collection. While the role of penis envy is
minimized (except by Roiphe and Galenson), it is replaced by the
importance of ‘inner-genital’ sensations which are believed by these
authors to play a special and important role in the development of the girl.
Specific to these American psychoanalysts is the postulation of a conflictfree source of femininity prior to the perception of sexual difference.
This departs from the European perspective of Klein and of ChasseguetSmirgel, for whom feminine identity comes out of the gradual
integration of relational and conflictual phenomena. This is part of a
general theoretical difference between the American ‘ego psychologists’,
who believe that there is a conflict-free ego zone where cognition is
straightforward, and the European psychoanalysts, who are radically
against the idea that there is an area of cognition free of ambiguity,
conflict and sexuality. The psychoanalytic model in these papers has
shifted towards ego psychology and a concern with adaptation to reality
and cognitive functions. The attempt to integrate child observation and
psychological research means at times a change in focus away from the
unconscious and towards both biological and social factors. The approach
is at times ‘prospective’ observations rather than ‘retrospective’
elucidation of unconscious meanings. Distinct and central to this view is
the concept of gender identity, which is the awareness of belonging to one
sex and not the other. Femininity becomes the role assignment. There is
a sliding from sexuality to self-concept, from desire to perception. This
view differs from all others (Klein, Lacan, Freud) in that identity is here
seen as given and unified rather than the result of integration. Cognitive
functions, seen by these psychoanalysts as independent of unconscious
16 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
conflicts, play a central role, and femininity refers to the knowledge that
‘I am a girl’. Kleeman expresses it like this:
Though a number of authors have contradicted Freud by ascribing
vaginal sensations to the very young female…, the answer to the
question of when femininity begins would seem to lie in a study of the
origins of the little girl’s gender identity. Studying how a girl acquires
her sense of being female (the early phase of which we call core gender
identity) by a variety of methods, including direct observation of
children, reveals that the assignment of gender at birth is a crucial
moment. One cannot understand gender identity or gender role
without giving proper credit to the moment of assignment, which in
turn sets in motion a whole process of acculturation which teaches the
little girl that she is female and what and how a female is supposed to
think, to feel, and to act in the family and in the segment of society
that family represents. Innate differences exist between male and female
infants and children, but even more crucial for gender-identity
formation are the learning experiences of the young child. Parents
relate differently to girls and boys from birth. The expectations and
selective reinforcements conveyed to a girl are different from those
conveyed to a boy, though the process is usually subtle. The known
socialization inputs to the two genders are sufficiently dissimilar to
produce known gender differences in dependency and aggression, as
well as other traits (Mischel 1966). The learning experiences are
powerful enough to make them the predominant factor in
determining core gender identity (Money et al. 1955; Stoller 1968a,
1968b). Taken together, these facts confirm the existence of a primary
femininity in infancy.
(Kleeman 1976:11–14)
Core gender identity, according to Stoller, who coined the term, has no
implication of role or object relations; it is part of narcissism and is made
up of a biological force, the sex assignment at birth, parents’ attitudes
about the infant’s sex, early postnatal effects caused by habitual patterns of
handling the infant, and sensations, especially from the genitals. These are
the factors which make up ‘primary femininity’. This is the first of two
stages he postulates in the development of femininity in females. This
first stage is non-conflictual in origin and contributes to a sense of
femaleness. The second phase, which is the one described by Freud, is
the result of conflict, especially Oedipal conflict. Although Stoller talks
about primary femininity as a true self, he contradicts this when he writes
that the second phase is one which ‘produces a richer and more
complicated femininity not merely one of appearances, but one enriched by
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 17
desires to perform with the substance, rather than just the façade, of
femininity’ (Stoller 1976:77; italics mine).
While Freud (1925), Greenacre (1948, 1958) and Erikson (1964)
emphasized the impact of anatomical difference on the maturation of
certain ego-functions and sexual identity, the approach of the
contributors to the Blum volume emphasizes the cognitive
developmental aspect of gender learning. In particular the child’s labelling
herself a girl is seen as coming first, even before identification. The
cognition in the parent—My baby is a girl—also organizes a whole set of
cues, selective rewards and sanctions, and directives to the child. Parental
attitudes, originating partly in the culture and expressed in the family
setting, reflect normative and pathological gender-identity issues in those
significant adults.
We can see how the new explosion of papers in the 1960s and 1970s
lead in various directions. Nothing was resolved; if anything, they
engendered greater diversity even if at first glance one aim was united
around doing justice to women. Certain concepts might appear similar,
but in fact they refer to different things. For instance, the primary
femininity of the American authors is conceptually different from the
early femininity which Horney or Klein wrote about and which referred
to an instinctual and object-relational disposition rather than to a unified
cognitive apperception.
Nevertheless, certain writings had an undeniable and world-wide
impact. The work of Masters and Johnson, though hailed as ethically
dubious by all, had an unquestionable influence on psychoanalysis,
practice as well as theory.
Lacan’s work has also had a profound influence in France and the
Latin countries, though little direct influence in the Anglo-Saxon world
of psychoanalysis until very recently, when his ideas do seem to be slowly
permeating.
Diachronic versus synchronic: a cultural divide
The difference in perspectives, largely diachronic (that is, developmental)
in Anglo-Saxon writings, largely synchronic (that is, ahistorical and
structural) in French writings, originates in wider cultural traditions, with
the more empirical Anglo-Saxon approach and the more philosophical
French tradition. In the French tradition there is also a greater reverence
for and scholarly interest in ‘the text’; in this case, the Freudian text. The
continual return to Freud’s text is considered as important as clinical practice.
Dialogue across national barriers can be difficult when theoretical
premises are not made explicit and understood. These theoretical
differences are at the centre of the debate on femininity, since this debate
18 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
concerns the relationship of the biological and the psychological, and the
role of observational data, and since this is the foundation of the discord
between the models. The synchronic approach is concerned with
structures of the mind and their interconnections (at any one point in
time without reference to the historical past or notions of causality) while
the diachronic approach, which is more tied to the biological, is
concerned with the development of the child into the adult. Freud’s
perspective is bifocal with diachronic and synchronic components.
Although he proposed a theory of development (diachronic approach),
he also, for instance, did not revise his theory following the reports of
vaginal sensations in little girls because his considerations rested on the
unconscious representation of femininity in his adult patients (synchronic
approach).
French psychoanalysis has for a large part an antipathy for the genetic
perspective and has opted for the synchronic approach. André Green, for
instance (1986), not a disciple of Lacan, deplores a reduction of the
structural dimensions of psychoanalysis to the merely genetic. He points
out that the idea that studying the child as a way of finding greater
simplicity to the complexity of the adult, as an explanation, is a fallacy
(1979). Direct observation cannot account for the essential dimension of
psychoanalysis, which is to do with how the environment is interpreted
and internalized. The study of the child or the psychoanalysis of the child
does not offer greater simplicity, merely difference (Green, Diatkine) just
as the mentality of the savage is not simpler, only different. Secondary
processes do not develop from primary processes but always coexist and
conflict (Pontalis). Green (1979) writes that the observation of the child
is only of the order of day residues in relation to the dream.
Psychoanalysis comes into its own only in that construction of childhood
as in the construction of the dream. Direct observation of the child
cannot prove or disprove theory, he says, it only confirms the theory
which impregnates the perception of the situation. Direct observation
without theoretical hypotheses is unintelligible and cannot supply new
knowledge to psychoanalysis (Diatkine 1979). Green (1979) suggests that
there is a place for the child in psychoanalytic thinking, and that is to
stimulate ideas if we can allow the child in us to speak, much as we use countertransference in the clinical setting.
Whereas in the United States there is a bias, on the contrary, towards
direct observation and a developmental model and an important
theoretical place is taken by ego-functions and the appraisal of reality, in
Britain synchronic and diachronic mingle. In particular, there is a special
emphasis on the distinction between the historical child and the internal
child, always the result of projections and introjections, and and reality is
always an experienced reality. Observation is seen as secondary to prior
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 19
psychoanalystic insights, whereas observation in the work of Margaret
Mahler (for instance) takes on a primary function. As for infant
observation, which is part of the training of psychoanalysts and
psychotherapists in Britain, an important function of it is to be a
powerful emotional experience from which the observer will learn by his
response to it, much as Green advocates (see Rustin 1989). More
importantly, there is a significant strand of Kleinian thinking, starting
with Bion, which gives a special place to knowledge and the quest for
meaning within the psychical apparatus and is less concerned with the
genetic. Klein herself moved towards a more synchronic approach; in the
latter part of her work she is particularly concerned with structures of
thinking with the fluctuation of mental organizations between paranoidschizoid and depressive positions, and it is this aspect of her work which
has been the most influential on contemporary British psychoanalysis.
Nevertheless, there remain important theoretical differences between
the British and the French approach, and I think that the concept of
‘Nachträglichkeit’ encapsulates this. Nachträglichkeit meaningfully translated
as ‘après coup’ in French but inadequately as ‘deferred action’ in English—
a more apt translation has recently been given as ‘after revision’ by
Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986). It was Lacan who first pointed out the
importance of this concept in the work of Freud. The concept of ‘après
coup’, little found in Anglo-Saxon writings, is central to French thinking,
not just amongst the followers of Lacan. It refers to the fact that
experiences and memory-traces take on new meaning to fit in with new
experiences. The expression in French, ‘après coup’, gives it the sense of a
sudden revelation bestowed on something which has already happened.
Of special importance are the times of psychic reorganization with the
attainment of a new stage of development when meaning is given
retrospectively to those memory-traces. This is relevant to our topic,
because the castration complex refers to the privileged moment of psychic
reorganization where previous perceptions and events take on a new
meaning. This perspective of Nachträchlichkeit underlines a view of
psychical temporality and causality which departs from historical
progression. It rules out a view of the subject’s history reduced to linear
determinism which envisages only the action of the past on the present
(Laplanche and Pontalis 1973). For Klein, on the other hand, everything
has a meaning from the beginning (de Mijolla 1973) and influences later
development, and this is a crucial theoretical difference. This linear
determinism, of course, does not mean simple cause and effect, but the
castration complex (for instance) is not seen by Klein as a moment of
retrospective psychic re-structuring or a privileged moment but only as
lived out in function of earlier developments.
20 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
This opposition between a conception of a linear development and
one which moves around moments of privileged re-structuring makes for
a fundamentally different conception of the unconscious and psychic
development, and creates a cultural divide between French and AngloSaxon psychoanalysis which can make dialogue meaningless if this is not
understood. It is not just that the French are more interested in the
castration complex and the British in the early pre-genital stages or in a
very early Oedipus complex; it is a whole conception of psychoanalysis
which is at variance.
For Freud, and this is highlighted by Lacan, the castration complex
refers to that privileged moment in which earlier experiences are
reorganized and given special meaning, initiating the meaning of
masculinity and femininity. It is not reducible to earlier experiences;
‘castration’ is a ‘primal phantasy’ which organizes phantasy life,
irrespective of personal experiences. It is, as it were, imposed on the
individual. For Klein the Oedipus complex and the castration complex
are part of a progressive and ‘natural’ evolution, evolving out of lived and
instinctual experiences.
‘The body never stops haunting the presumed autonomy of the unconscious’
Lacan’s understanding of Freud is explicitly grounded in a structuralist
model, but equally important to our topic is the French existentialist
tradition of Sartre and de Beauvoir. It is this rejection of essentialism—
the notion of a female essence—which has led to Lacan’s work being
espoused by many feminist thinkers (analysts and non-analysts).
But is it so simple to do away with essence? Direct criticisms of Lacan’s
theory of femininity have come in particular from women analysts who
were at one point disciples of Lacan, such as Michèle Montrelay and
Luce Irigaray. They take note of Lacan’s schema, but they assign to
femininity an origin prior to the mark of symbolic difference and ‘the
law’, an origin before language. Couched in different terms, it is a return
to the earlier debate and the question of whether there is a femininity
prior to the castration complex. Lacan responds to this in his latest
writings by still maintaining that there is no prediscursive reality, no
feminine outside language. However, he introduces the idea that woman
has a ‘supplementary jouissance’ which the man knows nothing of. He
uses the term ‘supplementary’ to avoid ‘complementary’ which is the
conception of male and female as having two separate libidos that he is
criticizing. It seems that in introducing this notion of ‘supplementary
jouisssance’ he is implicitly recognizing that feminine sexuality is more than
—has a ‘supplement’ to—the lack of phallus.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 21
Lacan’s model, cannot, by definition, incorporate the area of
experience which is prediscursive, and I think it is relevant that such
experiences as reverie or intuition which belong to this realm and to the
earliest mother-and-baby relationship have tended to be talked about as
‘feminine’. This prediscursive mode of relating does not exclude the
triangular situation, since the father is always present for the mother.4 It is
also relevant that words related to such experiences have to do with the
‘inside’ of the body: ‘inner thoughts’, ‘inner space’, ‘container’,
‘containment’, ‘holding’—a representation of the maternal figure which
is not just lack of phallus. It could be possible to think of such
representations as being in the same relationship to the actual womb or
breast as the relationship of phallus to penis, but this time it is a
representation of prediscursive phenomena which in my mind any useful
model must be able to incorporate. This ‘feminine’ (in the linguistic
sense used by Lacan) side seems to be strikingly absent in Lacan’s work in
which a person’s sense of self is in continual flux and dependent on the
Other rather than secured around an internalized developmental
experience born out of a sense of containment.
Luce Irigarary suggests that there is in women a direct and
unsymbolized relationship to the mother—not mediated by language.
The girl, says Irigaray, ‘has the mother, in some sense, in her skin, in the
humidity of the mucous membranes, in the intimacy of her most
intimate parts, in the mystery of her relation to gestation, birth, and to
her sexual identity’ (Irigaray 1988:133). It is in this light that one can
understand the poignancy of the threat of psychic annihilation for the girl
and the consequent defensive attempts at differentiation from the mother
by recourse to ‘masculinity’ in anorexia nervosa and homosexuality, for
instance (Breen 1988, 1989b).
Lacan’s work is important in stressing that psychoanalysis is about
unconscious desire which is not in a direct relationship to ‘nature’, which
is also not a desire which can be fulfilled in reality. In that sense, as
Moustafa Safouan points out, ‘anatomy is not destiny’, even though it
does shape the form the castration complex takes (1976:13). But if it
shapes the form the castration complex takes, if it introduces a differential
account of the Oedipus complex and its dissolution, can one so easily
remove the body from the semiotic? As Andrew Parker puts it:
the body never stops haunting the presumed autonomy of the
unconscious, never stops littering the field of psychoanalysis….
Anatomy, then, is neither fully destiny nor lack of destiny in its
psychoanalytic conceptuality: it is instead what might be termed its adestiny, that which prevents psychoanalysis from completely coming
22 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
into its own as Theory, from thinking that it escapes the body when it
defines itself against it.
(Parker 1986:102)5
If the body cannot be ignored, and I do not believe it can be, what is the
role of the female body in the structuring of the feminine unconscious?
Can we think of the role of the body without falling into a biologizing
trap of equating biology and psychology? The richness of Freud’s
thinking is that he did not in fact omit one or the other sides of the
problematic. There is not a one-to-one relationship between body and
mind but nor can the body be ignored. The body for Freud is always
representation of the body. And if that is so, then it is possible to think
that femininity includes both a representation of lack (which has nothing
to do with the biological body since in reality there is nothing missing in
the female apparatus), and also the representation of an inner space and
heterosexual attraction more tied to biological and anatomical reality.
The work concerned with specific feminine biological experiences tied
to the life cycle of women comes into place here (Benedek 1956; Bibring
1959; Pines 1982, 1989, 1990; Breen 1974, 1989a).
Both conceptions coexist in Freud’s work—in a rather unhappy marriage
—hence the out-of-focusness which is hard to grasp, but I am suggesting
that it is the nature of the beast which makes it an unhappy marriage.
A contradiction structures the feminine unconscious
A way forward is to speak of a duality in feminine sexuality. Dolto in
France and Kestenberg in the United States look at this duality from a
developmental perspective. Dolto (1965) describes two stages to penis
envy. The first she calls ‘envie de penis centrifuge’ (centrifugal penis envy),
which accompanies castration anxiety and which is experienced as lack or
infirmity unfairly inflicted; the second, ‘envie de penis centripète’ (directed
inwards), accompanied by pride in her genital which permits an
identification with her mother and brings with it the desire to receive the
penis (penis envy in the sense of penis desire). Kestenberg (1980)
distinguishes between an ‘inner-genital phase’ in the third year of life in
which inner-genital impulses are externalized and expressed in the
handling of baby dolls, and a phallic phase, divided into a ‘phallic negativeOedipal phase’ with intense penis envy and a ‘phallic positive-Oedipal
phase’, where phallic sadistic wishes turn against herself. There seems to
be a certain contradiction in these two accounts with envy of the penis
and a sense of lack coming before the wish to receive the penis for
Dolto, while it is the other way around for Kestenberg. This suggests that
it may be more apt to speak of coexistence than stages. (Klein, we saw,
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 23
does not speak of stages or coexistence, but for her, penis envy is mainly
a defence.)
Michèle Montrelay goes further; she stresses that there is a
contradiction between a phallic and a ‘concentric’ character to feminine
sexuality, and suggests that it is this contradiction itself which structures
the feminine unconscious. Braunschweig and Fain also believe that both
‘Freudian’ and ‘Kleinian’ conceptions of female sexuality coexist and that
this coexistence is usually conflictual; the woman lives two Oedipal
conflicts, one quasi-biological linked to the maternal role and which
minimizes the role of the man with the penis experienced as being inside
the mother (Kleinian), the other which enhances the role of the clitoris
and the subordination of maternity to paternity (with the role of the
external father). The wish to have a child (basic feminine desire) and the
wish to have a child from the father (substitute for a wish for the penis)
are in basic opposition.
Although most contemporary work still opts for one or the other,
thinking in terms of a contradiction and opposition between a more
biologically based experience of femininity (a positive femininity) and a
femininity constructed from the experienced of lack (a negative
femininity) goes a long way, I believe, towards understanding the
historical oscillations and disputes in the literature and also encompasses a
greater range of clinical phenomena. In the case of psychoanalysis it
cannot be said that ‘the proof is in the pudding’ because there is always
an important gap between the theory and the clinical data, and clinical
data are always interpreted data and subject to further interpretation.
However, both the experiences of lack, and the experience of a basic
‘positive’ femininity seem to come back with sufficient consistency as
central and determining to warrant thinking of them as coexistent and
conflictual.
Mainly about men
A silent revolution in the psychoanalytic understanding of men
The same basic question of the relationship of mind and body is of
course present too in the study of masculinity, and Lacan’s solution
applies to masculinity as it does to femininity, since he removes the body
altogether from the psychoanalytic understanding of masculinity and
femininity which he sees as a division in language. This question,
however, has not on the whole been a focus since in Freud’s model there
is not, with masculinity, the same disjunction and hence such a clear
bifocality as with femininity. In his scheme masculinity has a more
natural and central place for the boy than femininity has for the girl,
24 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
femininity being achieved by the girl only as the result of a lengthy
process.
In fact, there has been a revolution in the psychoanalytic
understanding of masculinity, but it has been more silent and has gone
almost unnoticed.
Although it could be said that more has implicitly been written on male
sexuality since it is with and in himself that Freud’s theories first
originated with little Oedipus becoming the norm, the study of
masculine sexuality is remarkable by the relative paucity of papers
specifically devoted to it.
Most of the early papers on female sexuality did make reference to
male sexuality. The role of pre-Oedipal phenomena was explored in
relation to men but often with a time lag. Understanding of men’s
masculinity came in the wake of the debates on femininity.
Following Freud’s discovery of the importance of pre-Oedipal
phenomena in girls he suggested that the pre-Oedipal phase should be
investigated in boys too, but he did not go on to do it himself. Others
did, and this lead to three major discoveries; first, that the boy’s early
relationship to the mother could be strongly aggressive, while Freud
believed that the mother-son relationship was the least ambivalent of all
relationships; secondly, that the boy faces the difficult task of negotiating
passive strivings in relation to the mother; and thirdly, for some authors,
that there is an early feminine phase with sexual strivings towards the father.
Those analysts who had been part of the Freud-Jones debate and
asserted that the girl has an early knowledge of the vagina, also postulated
an unconscious knowledge of the vagina in boys and a fear of it. They
also questioned the validity of a typical phallic stage in boys as well as in
girls (Jones, Horney and Klein).
If we seriously accept Freud’s dictum that the sexual theories formed
by children are modeled on their own sexual constitution, it must
surely mean […] that the boy, urged on by his impulses to penetrate,
pictures in fantasy a complementary female organ.
(Horney 1967:140).
Jones believed that the boy denies the existence of the vagina because he
can thus avoid jealous conflicts (in avoiding knowledge of the parental
intercourse) and castration. ‘The idea of the vulva must precede that of
castration. If there were no dangerous cavity to penetrate into there
would be no fear of castration’ (Jones 1938:577). Horney suggests that
fear of the father’s penis is put forward to hide the intense dread of the
vulva (Horney 1932:353). Klein explained this fear of the mother’s body
as resulting from the projection of sadistic impulses into her. In addition,
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 25
Horney saw as critical the boy’s fear of ridicule owing to his knowledge
that his penis is not large enough to satisfy the mother.
The authors who retained Freud’s notion of phallic monism also
recognized the importance of an early phase in boys, but their view of
that has differed markedly, particularly from Klein’s description of early
Oedipal phenomena coloured by pre-genital components. Ruth Mack
Brunswick, in her paper based on her discussions with Freud, stresses that
the phenomena of the pre-Oedipal phase should be described in their
own terms and not in the terms of the Oedipus complex. During this preOedipal phase the father is not yet a rival, there is no sexual
differentiation between individuals since the boy takes for granted the
universal possession of the penis, and the pre-genital zones outweigh the
genital one in importance.
With their theory based more on instinct, these authors became
particularly preoccupied with the notion that the boy has to make a
change from passivity to activity. Ruth Mack Brunswick thought that
this was not too problematic because there is always a natural passage
from passivity to activity on the part of the child. It learns to sit instead of
being held; it reaches out for its own bottle instead of merely receiving it;
each bit of activity is based to some extent on an identification with the
active mother. The problem, she says, is greater for the girl, who will
need to effect the difficult passage to the ‘passive Oedipus complex’.6 On
the contrary, ‘the boy seems to pass with relative ease out of this
predominantly passive, pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother into the
characteristically active, normal Oedipus complex’. In the case of an
unduly strong, persistent Oedipus complex in the small boy, which is
given up with extreme difficulty, much of the fixation is passive instead
of active and pre-Oedipal instead of Oedipal (Mack Brunswick
1940:248). Activity is impaired in the boy due to regression or fixation at
the pre-Oedipal level or a ‘constitutional inability to overcome the
primary inertia’.
Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, on the contrary, thought that the early passive
component was problematic for the boy. The passive libidinal strivings
which are first satisfied by the mother in the pre-Oedipal phase will form
the pre-history of the positive attachment to the father, which is a
‘passive feminine’ or ‘homosexual’ one (the negative Oedipus complex).
While the girl’s passive attachment falls within normal development, in
the boy it contributes to pathological trends which may later disturb his
normal sexuality (Lampl-de Groot 1946:76–7). Sylvia Payne goes still
further, and states that the boy’s development might well be more difficult
than that of the girl—the reverse of what was originally believed.
Although the boy does not have to change the sex of is love object, he
does have to change the character of his relation to the primary object
26 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
from an oral-receptive sucking to an active aggressive penetrating and
discharging relationship, whereas the girl can displace oral-receptive
sucking tendencies from mouth to vagina (Payne 1936:22).
A number of early papers counterbalance Freud’s emphasis on the
girl’s penis envy by discussing the boy’s envy of the mother and her
procreative capacity (Boehm 1930; Groddeck 1923; Horney 1926;
Jacobson 1950; Bettelheim 1955; Van der Leeuw 1958), Klein believing
it to be a more fundamental envy (in both sexes) than penis envy. Felix
Boehm writes about an early, feminine phase of development in which
the boy’s feelings are very much like those of a girl and leads to envy of
the woman’s functions. This ‘vagina envy’, he says, looks very much like
the woman’s penis envy. But he concludes:
I do not think the material I have quoted in this paper enables us to
decide with any certainty whether the man’s envy is as closely related
to narcissism as the woman’s or…whether it is substantially influenced
by a passsive-homosexual attitude towards the father.
(Boehm 1930:466–7)
Melanie Klein in her early work also describes a ‘femininity phase’ in
boys as well as in girls. It results from a turning away from the mother
towards the father and an identification with the mother. The femininity
complex’, parallel to the castration complex in girls, consists in the
frustrated desire for the organs of conception, pregnancy and parturition.
In this phase the boy has an oral-sucking fixation on his father’s penis.
He wants to rob the mother of her internal possessions, including babies,
and the father’s penis felt to be inside the mother, and also to destroy her
babies out of jealousy. He fears punishment by having his body mutilated
and dismembered and castrated by the mother. This combines with the
dread of castration from the father for attacking his penis inside the
mother. Hence the superego is formed from the persecuting images of
both the mother and the father. The anxiéty associated with the
femininity phase drives the boy back to identification with the father.
At first Klein explained the turn away from the mother to the father as
the result of deprivation due to weaning in particular; later she came to
believe that there is an inherent ambivalence towards objects. In her later
writings Klein dropped her concept of a feminine phase altogether.7
Development is then described as proceeding in both boys and girls
through the integration of active and passive trends in relation to each
parent, within the context of a very early Oedipal configuration. Klein’s
description of male and female development runs parallel, and the
different outcome rests on instinctual differences and how the instinctual
trends are dealt with. Anatomical sexual differences have repercussions
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 27
too in Klein’s view: the girl has a greater tendency for introjection due to
the receptive nature of her sexuality; the boy, on the other hand,
possesses with the penis what is felt to be both an instrument of cruelty
due to the urethral sadistic phantasies connected with it, and an
instrument of reparation through its life-giving and pleasure-giving
function. The penis also offers the boy possibilities of alleviating
anxieties. For the boy as for the girl, the sadistic attacks on the mother’s
body makes her body a place full of dangers. However, the boy has a
specific way of being able to deal with these anxieties. He uses the fact of
having a penis to overcome his fear of internal and external dangers and
prove his superiority over the dangerous external and internal objects.
Because of this, the boy develops his sense of the omnipotence of excreta
less strongly than the girl, replacing it in part by the omnipotence of his penis.
He endows his own penis with destructive powers and likens it to
devouring and murderous beasts, firearms, and so on. His belief that
his urine is a dangerous substance and his equation of his poisonous
and explosive faeces with his penis go to make the latter the executive
organ of his sadistic tendencies…his penis and his sense of
omnipotence become linked together in a way which is of
fundamental importance for the man’s activity and his mastery of anxiety.
(1932b:243)
The mother’s body is a permanent anxiety object for him, but this also
increases the attraction of women because it is an incentive to overcome
his anxiety.
the boy’s phantasies of taking possession of his mother’s body by
copulating with her form the basis of his attempts to conquer the
external world and to master anxiety along masculine lines. Both as
regards the sexual act and sublimations he displaces his dangersituations into the outer world and overcomes them there through the
omnipotence of his penis.
(1932b:243–4)
For Klein both the boy and the girl have to struggle with the primitive
psychotic anxieties which threaten the boy’s penis and the girl’s internal
organs, through to a progressive integration and acceptance of the self’s
impulses. For the boy there are helpful factors in that reassurance is more
easily afforded due to the external nature of his genital, in so far as he can
make direct reparation to the mother in phantasy with his penis and in so
far as his envy of the mother is compensated by his being able to turn to
a possession of his own.
28 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Klein minimized her departure from Freud, but her model is
significantly different in this area of thinking. It is not just that Klein
describes early forms of castration anxiety or forerunners of the castration
complex. In her model, castration anxiety is primarily a consequence of
sadistic attack on the object and only one form of retaliation feared from
both mother and father. This conception departs radically from that of
Freud, for whom the castration complex is specifically linked to the
prohibition on incest, hence is always part of an Oedipal situation, and
marks a definite and structuring moment in mental development.
This still marks a fundamental theoretical difference between
psychoanalysts, though it often remains implicit. Generally speaking,
however, in spite of this difference there has been a significant move in
Britain, in the United States and in France (with the notable exception of
Lacan) towards recognizing the importance of the pre-Oedipal phase (or
in Kleinian terminology pre-genital and early Oedipal), whether or not
the castration complex is considered to be a privileged moment of
structuring significance. While the questioning of social roles and
structures in the 1960s had a very vocal and colourful expression in the
feminist movement and in the discussions around female sexuality, this
move towards recognizing the importance of the pre-Oedipal phase in
men formed part of a quieter revolution which was brooding, its seeds
already sown before the 1960s, leading to a complete about-face in the
understanding of masculinity. This understanding developed from the
1960s in the following ways.
First, while authors in the 1930s had begun to note the more difficult
task facing the boy because of the need for him to change his aim from
passive to active (Payne), after the 1960s psychoanalysts started to note
the boy’s greater vulnerability in terms of the development of his masculine
identity due to his early involvement with the mother. This view is in
some ways pre-dated by Freud’s discussion of Leonardo da Vinci’s
homosexuality which he links to the absence of a father. But whereas
Freud considered the absence of the father in terms of the Oedipal
situation, psychoanalysts now concentrated on processes of identity
formation.
Greenacre (1953) had already stressed the importance of the first
eighteen months to the boy’s masculine development and secure gender
identity.
Stoller, in his now classical study (1972), shows that transsexual boys
had mothers who treated them as an extension of themselves, hence the
boys’ sense of femininity. Greenson thought that the threat of fusion
with the mother or of re-engulfment was fundamental. He writes:
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 29
The girl too must dis-identify from mother if she is to develop her
own unique identity, but her identification with mother helps her
establish her femininity. It is my contention that men are far more
uncertain about their maleness than women are about their femaleness.
I believe women’s certainty about their gender identity and men’s
insecurity about theirs are rooted in early identification with the
mother. I am using the term ‘dis-identify’ in order to sharpen my
discussion about the complex and interrelated processes which occur
in the child’s struggle to free himself from the early symbiotic fusion
with mother…. The male child’s ability to dis-identify will determine
the success or failure of his later identification with his father. These
two phenomena, dis-identifying from mother and counter-identifying
with father are interdependent and form a complementary series.
(Greenson 1968:370)
The refusal of femininity and the lack of knowledge of the feminine
organ (a point in common for both sexes, according to Freud) is
understood less as bedrock and more as a defence against fusion with the
mother, with its consequent loss of identity (Stein 1961).
Greenson suggests that although women envy men, men at a more
deeply unconscious level harbour an intense envy of women, in
particular the mother, behind a façade of contempt, and he thinks that
this envy is destructive of men’s gender identity. He suggests that the
dread of homosexuality, which is the fear of losing one’s gender identity,
is stronger and more persistent in men than in women.
Secondly, the role of the father has shifted in the conceptualization of
masculine development. The positive relationship to the father (described
as ‘negative Oedipus complex’ or ‘homosexual attachment’) had been
mainly seen by earlier authors as threatening to the development of
masculine sexuality (for example, Lampl-de Groot 1947:76). Recent
thinking stresses the reverse. Klein (1945) had already described how a
positive picture of the father’s penis as a good and creative organ is a
precondition of the boy’s capacity to develop his positive Oedipus desires.
For only if the boy has a strong belief in the ‘goodness’ of his male genital
—his father’s and his own—can he allow himself to experience his
genital desires towards his mother. When his fear of the castrating
father is mitigated by trust in the good father, he can face his Oedipus
hatred and rivalry. Thus the inverted and positive Oedipus tendencies
develop simultaneously and there is a close interaction between them.
(Klein 1945:411)
30 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Increasingly psychoanalysts stress the crucial importance of the boy’s positive
relationship to the pre-Oedipal father as facilitating the important task of
disidentification from the mother. Greenson writes:
How much of the boy’s identification with the father is a
counteridentification, actually a ‘contra’-identification, a means of
counteracting the earlier identification? Is it not in this area where we
can find an answer to why so many men are uncertain about their
maleness? Perhaps it is the shaky basis of their identification with the
father, their contraidentification, which makes them so reactively
contemptuous of women and so envious, unconsciously.
(Greenson 1968:373)
Loewald (1951) sees the father as a positive force against the threat of reengulfment which precedes the identification heir to the Oedipus
complex described by Freud. Glasser also describes the father as an
alternative object which can protect against the mother (Glasser 1985).
Within Mahler’s framework the father is seen as a facilitator to the
separationindividuation process. Abelin describes an ‘early triangulation’
around eighteen months where a toddler identifies with the rival father’s
wish for mother. Using Piaget and Lacan’s work, within the framework
of Mahler’s research, he suggests that this early triangulation assures the
passage from a mirroring, one-to-one interaction to symbolic
representation of more than one object in space, including the self.
The role of the father has been increasingly understood as fundamental
to psychic functioning in that it is the father who introduces reality
between mother and child. The actual absence of the father does not
mean absence of representation, since a child without a father constructs
the father. For the same reason the introjected father is very different
from the reality. Limentani (1991), in re-considering the clinical material
from his work with sexual deviants, notes the absence of the father from
the material, which he speaks of as a lack of internalization of the father.
Chasseguet-Smirgel suggests that the sexual deviant minimizes the role of
the father while creating the illusion that he himself is the main object of
the mother’s sexual interest. For Lacan, the absence of the representation
of the father marks psychosis. The reason for the absence of
representation remains open to question. If the absent father is
constructed, maybe one needs to be thinking more of a refusal of
representation of the father, similar to the refusal of acceptance of the
parental relationship described by Britton (1989).
American psychoanalysts, from the perspective of ego psychology,
speak of a non-defensive pre-Oedipal identification of boys with the
father (Tyson 1986), and consider the role of the early relationship to the
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 31
father with his special characteristics (deep voice, different way of
handling babies, and so on).
Thirdly, most theoretical perspectives now consider the role of early
genital phenomena, though not all agree as to their significance. Galenson
and Roiphe describe an early genital phase before the Oedipus complex,
beginning between fifteen and twenty-four months of age. Genital
arousal at this time provides a channel for tension discharge and for
pleasure but without any Oedipal resonance. From their observational
studies they conclude that the early awareness of sexual difference is less
disturbing for boys than for girls because boys deny sexual difference, by
avoiding confrontation with female genitals and by a turn to the father
and identification with him. They suggest that this extensive use of denial
interferes with the boy’s capacity for symbolic elaboration in fantasy and
interferes with body schematization (Galenson and Roiphe 1980:817).
The emergence of Oedipal strivings threatens the strategy of denial and
identification with the father.
In Kleinian theory, on the other hand, early genital impulses are
thought to be accompanied by Oedipal phantasies. There is a certain
collapsing of distinctions, since the Oedipus complex is thought to arise
before the classical genital phase (Freud’s phallic phase), so that the term ‘preOedipal’ is dropped in favour of pre-genital, which means before the
stage of genital primacy. In the Kleinian conception there is an interaction
of impulses from primary zones rather than a linear sequence as in the
Freudian model, and the attainment of the genital stage merely means a
strengthening of the genital impulses. For instance, O’Shaughnessy
(1976) writes that the anal zone enters into the infant’s awareness from
the beginning in an important way and that anal primacy is a defence;
when it persists and predominates it belongs to pathology (see also
Heimann 1962). Similarly and significantly, the phallic phase is also seen
by Kleinian psychoanalysts not as a normal passage to loving the object
but as a narcissistic defence which impedes the negotiation of the
Oedipal situation and mature male sexuality (Brenman Pick 1985).
Fourthly, the place and understanding of castration anxiety has changed.
In classical theory the castration complex describes a set of relations and
fears linked to the prohibition on incest. It initiates a differential account
for the boy and the girl, bringing about the dissolution of the Oedipus
complex for the boy, initiating it for the girl. The word ‘complex’
denotes its all-encompassing character and role as psychic organizer
marking an important moment in development. Masculinity and
femininity come into being at that point with the awareness of
difference. For both sexes, its mode of resolution will have a determining
effect, not just in the area of sexuality but also of character.
32 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Lacan points out that what is important in Freud’s account is not the
actual body and the perception of the absent penis, nor is it actual
prohibitions from the father, but it is the presence of a symbolic threat
which marks the condition of being human. The castration complex
hence refers to a prohibition against incest which goes beyond the
individual experience and belongs to the human order; this distinguishes
the human race within the animal kingdom. This understanding of
castration with its central place in instigating sexual difference sets Freud
apart from all other contributors to this field of study, all of whom relied
on a biological explanation for the difference between the sexes—and
this on either side of the Freud-Jones debate (Mitchell 1982).
As early as the 1920s the link between castration with the prohibition
on incest and the resolution of the Oedipus complex, as well as the
primary place of castration in the formation of masculinity, were
questioned. It was suggested that castration anxiety represented other
losses, the nipple (Starcke 1921), or the womb (Alexander 1922; Rank
1924). Later, Klein also suggested that other factors contributed to the
dissolution of the Oedipus complex.
While I…fully agree with Freud that castration fear is the leading
anxiety situation in the male, I cannot agree with his description of it
as the single factor which determines the repression of the Oedipus
complex. Early anxieties from various sources contribute all along to
the central part which castration fear comes to play in the climax of
the Oedipus situation. Furthermore, the boy experiences grief and
sorrow in relation to his father as a loved object, because of his
impulses to castrate and murder him…. His feelings of guilt about his
aggressive impulses towards his father increase his urge to repress his
genital desires.
(Klein 1945:417)
Hence it is not just fear, but in a large measure love which for Klein
contributes to the development of the Oedipus complex and its passing.
In fact, if anxieties and frustrations are too great, the Oedipus situation
cannot develop.
A number of contemporary authors also stress the narcissistic factors
involved in the passing of the Oedipus complex (Person 1986),
something which Freud and also Horney had already referred to.
Although castration fears are still considered important, the castration
complex as such does not in contemporary writings hold the place it did
for Freud, except for psychoanalysts who adhere to a largely classical position.
‘Castration’ is generally understood to represent for both sexes the
acknowledgement of incompleteness, of human limitations, the
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 33
abandonment of the belief in one’s omnipotence and the possession of all
attributes including the sole possession of the mother’s love. It represents
acknowledging the mother’s relationship to a third party. More
specifically, castration anxiety is often understood as integrating and
organizing more primitive anxieties (Duparc 1986), often of a psychotic
nature—persecution, loss of identity and annihilation. Stoller, David and
others suggest (David 1975) that in paranoia, the fear of castration is
more than the fear of losing the penis; it is the fear of losing the sense of
self, the fear of ‘depersonation’ rather than just the fear of
‘depersonalization’ (David 1975).8
Tyson considers that castration anxiety can be understood as a
developmental metaphor:
Fears of castration that appear to have primarily pre-Oedipal elements
in later life, that is, fears of the ‘phallic castrating woman’, suggest an
early disturbance in the mother-child relationship, unmediated by
father, so that the resulting feeling of lack of safety, fears of
helplessness, vulnerability, or lack of trust become organized around a
fear of castration.
(Tyson 1986:6)
Phyllis Tyson suggests that castration anxiety is not only an anxiety about
the loss of the penis, but also relates ‘to the overall sense of masculine
identity and fear of one’s masculinity being undermined’ (Tyson
1989:1060). She writes that castration anxiety, ‘rather than coming into
florescence and completion in the phallic phase, as Freud thought, is
something the boy must overcome from the beginning of the separation
process’ (1989:1056).
Freud’s notion of the castration complex has been so diluted that
Limentani (1991) even doubts whether castration anxiety ‘will ever
regain again its position at the very centre of a discussion of male
sexuality. Nowadays, almost all analyses tend to deal more and more with
early components within the framework of the mother-child
relationship.’ I think that this can be understood in the sense both that
castration anxiety is now more generally seen as being only one form of
persecutory anxiety (in relation to mother and to father) and also in the
sense that male sexuality is seen to integrate many elements beside the
‘phallic’ penetrating function. Monique Schneider (1988) says:
Man is not only phallic. I even think that he could not be tolerated as
penetrating if he were not enveloping at the same time. Generally,
psychoanalysis doesn’t want to know anything about this enveloping
34 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
power because it reactivates a sort of deep feminine and maternal
identification.
The debate is, however, by no means over, and Rangell in a 1991 paper
rejects the idea of castration as metaphor and returns to the more classical
view of it as ‘a pathological belief operative in the unconscious which
originated during the period of childhood sexuality’ (Rangell 1991:3); he
suggests that if castration anxiety has become a subject of the past it is
because psychoanalysis focuses now more on interactional aspects at the
expense of reconstruction.
Fifthly, bisexuality is given a more important place and more generally
recognized as an essential psychological balance of identifications, and an
internal balance necessary for sexual and psychic integration.
Freud had oscillated in using the term ‘bisexuality’ to denote biological
facts and psychological facts, and between ‘bisexuality’ as a given from
which the child progressively moves away in order to gain a sexual
identity, and ‘bisexuality’ as an internal state necessary for psychic and
sexual integration (David 1975; Laplanche 1970). It is the latter meaning
which is given increasing importance. David writes that bisexuality
should not just be understood as a negative concept (1975:823), but
needs to be considered as having an important positive and creative
aspect. He suggests using the concept of a pre-genital or pre-Oedipal
psychobisexuality which refers to an early introjection of a sexual
differentiation, prior to the phallic stage.
Meltzer proposes to use the term ‘ambisexual’ to refer to the
appearance of both heterosexual and homosexual acts, as distinct from
‘bisexual’, which does not refer to pathology but is a metapsychological
and biological concept. He relates the bisexual nature of mental states to
the introjective identification with internal parental objects and not as a
direct expression of the id. This avoids relating masculine and feminine
to pre-specified dichotomies such as active-passive, intellectual-intuitive
and so on.
Winnicott describes the female and the male elements in both sexes in
the following way: the ‘pure female element’ in both men and women
relates to the experience of ‘being’. This sense of being antedates being-atone-with, since baby and object are one. The male element, in contrast,
presupposes separateness and is object-relating:
on the male element side, identification needs to be based on complex
mental mechanisms, mental mechanisms that must be given time to
appear, to develop, and to become established as part of the new
baby’s equipment. On the female element side, however, identity
requires so little mental structure that this primary identity can be a
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 35
feature from very early, and the foundation for simple being can be
laid (let us say) from the birth date, or before, or soon after….
Psychoanalysts have perhaps given special attention to this male
element or drive aspect of object-relating, and yet have neglected the
subject-object identity to which I am drawing attention here, which is
the basis of the capacity to be. The male element does while the female
element (in males and females) is….
It seems that frustration belongs to satisfaction-seeking. To the
experience of being belongs something else, not frustration, but maiming.
(Winnicott 1971:80–1)
Hence the feminine for Winnicott is that state of primary
nondifferentiation (in both sexes) which means that men have a more
fragile sexual identity and greater bisexuality because of the early
relationship to the mother.
The recognition of the role and importance of feminine identification
in male sexuality and masculine development both as a threat to
masculinity but, more importantly, as positive for intrapsychic and
interrelational balance has been a major line of development in the recent
decades. This psychobisexuality is increasingly understood to be
fundamental not just for sexuality but for psychic integration and
structuring more generally (McDougall 1989). For Kleinian authors
psychic bisexuality, which derives from early identificatory processes and
the introjection of each parent, rests on the capacity to have a
differentiated image of the two parents in interaction with each other.
While Freud believed women to be more bisexual than men because of
the early relationship to the mother, the understanding of identity
formation has shifted perspective to considering the large part played by
feminine identification in men.
A number of authors have pointed out a confusion in the literature
between homosexuality and femininity (Meltzer 1973; David 1975).
Freud himself in his analysis of Schreber does not distinguish between a
homosexual wish and a feminine wish (David 1975:812). Bergler (1969)
writes that it is important to make a distinction between a passive
feminine position in men often referred to erroneously as homosexual,
and true homosexuality. It is now also generally recognized that true
homosexuality itself covers a number of different psychological structures
(McDougall 1989; Limentani 1989; and so on).
Sometimes, the term ‘homosexual’ is used simply to refer to the
positive, loving relationship of son to father necessary to psychic health.
Some French psychoanalysts (E.Kestemberg 1984; Sullivan and WeilHalpern 1984) use the term ‘primary homosexuality’ to refer to a primary
identification of the son to the father, pre-supposing a distinction of
36 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
maternal and paternal object and proceeding from a narcissistic object
choice. This primary homosexuality rests on a shared phantasy between
parent and child of the same sex in the context of the primal scene, and
serves as an important foundation to the formation of sexual identity. It
facilitates later identifications and thus helps to guard against the second
‘narcissistic homosexuality’ (Frejaville 1984).
Denis (1982) suggests that for the boy there is a primary homosexuality
in relation to the mother at a stage before sexual differentiation, when
the mother is conceived as like the self, and from which relation will
develop tenderness. The recognition of sexual difference will put an end
to this primary homosexuality and organize psychic bisexuality. Heterosexuality and secondary homosexuality now appear and give retrospective
meaning to the past. From this perspective it is no longer the case that
the boy keeps the same object while the girl has to change hers, but the
difference is that there is a change which gives retrospectively a different
meaning to the object, homosexual for the girl and heterosexual for the
boy after the perception of sexual difference.
There certainly has been no simplification or unification of views on
masculine development. Nevertheless, what most psychoanalysts have
now recognized is the particular fragility of masculine identity, and this
makes for a complete about-face from classical theory. While for Freud
there was an important disjunction between mind and body in the case
of little girls, with femininity only the end result of lengthy process, boys’
masculinity, was described as taking a more ‘natural’ course, leading
without explanation required to the Oedipus complex (at which point
the resolution of the castration complex would determine its destiny).
Recent researches suggest that the early (or subsequent) course is far from
straightforward and that the ‘fear of femininity’ Freud describes stands on
even deeper and more basic foundations than he believed. Now, even
more than then, the out-of-focusness is evident, the important
disjunction yet connectedness of mind and body in the male psyche.
At the end of this rapid overview, which can do no more than indicate
the major issues, it will be seen that there are two important, related but
not identical, questions in the debate on female sexuality, a debate which
maximally highlights the question of the place of the body in
psychoanalysis since it is in regard to women that, according to classical
theory, psychology is at odds with the actual body. On the one hand, the
question of whether there is a specific positive feminine experience
‘outside’ or ‘before’ or ‘alongside’ the experience of lack, on the other
hand, the question of whether the early relationship to the mother is to
be considered masculine or an intrinsic part of femininity, and conjointly
whether the clitoris is a masculine or feminine organ, psychologically
speaking.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 37
What stands out beyond the important theoretical differences is the
duality at the heart of the feminine in contrast with the greater unity of
masculine sexuality, as well as the continuing greater ‘mystery’ of
femininity which some ascribe to its prediscursive component and others
relate to the specific nature of the bodily schemata. At the same time, the
greater understanding of bisexuality and of the importance for the boy as
well as for the girl of the earliest relationship to the mother, has brought
a much more complex and differentiated understanding of male sexuality
beyond the apparent simplicity. A retreat to the concept of bisexuality,
however—an important concept in itself—cannot be an explanatory
solution but, more, a working tool. It can only be useful in conjunction
and in tension with the concept of the Oedipus complex.
While Freud’s genius was to point towards the relative independence
of psychological from biological, he none the less believed that ‘the ego
is first and foremost a bodily ego’ (Freud 1923:26).
For some, the real Freud is the one who separates psychoanalysis from
biology, while for others the biological substratum is basic to an
understanding of sexuality. I have tried to show that this can be
understood as an inherent contradiction and duality which rests at the
heart of psychoanalysis and of sexuality—the study of unconscious
meanings and fantasies which have the body as their seat. There is a
disjunction yet complex articulation of biological and psychological, and
of anatomical and psychological. It is in relation to female sexuality that
in the classical model the disjunction is greatest, that the construction of
sexuality is least straightforward. The issue, as we have seen, is complex
and has been debated from various positions, with Montrelay, for
instance, arguing for a duality of ‘quasi-biological’ and ‘phallic’
development, with Braunschweig and Fain or Gillespie arguing for the
‘femininity’ of the clitoris.
Psychoanalysis is always confronted with the question of the links of
body and psyche, and its foundation comes at the point of rupture
between the two (Gantheret 1971). If it is the prerogative of the
psychoanalytic approach to stress the relative independence of the
psychological from the biological, and if in order not to forget this
independence it has sometimes had to be taken to extremes, it still holds
true that identificatory and interactional processes are woven around and
in a loose association with impulses and body schemata. It is a ‘criss cross
and overlap’ (Wittgenstein) in which nothing can be assumed but in
which the body cannot be ignored either. However, the body we are
talking about from a psychoanalytic point of view is always a
representation of the body and hence come the open possibilities, so that
understanding the representation of a ‘concentric’ feminine sexuality
need not mean a reductionist biologistic approach. I have argued for an
38 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
understanding of femininity which encompasses both an unconscious
representation of lack and an unconscious representation of its
‘concentric’ aspects.
The papers chosen for this book—all from the last two or three decades
—come from Britain, France and the United States; the selection does
not, of course, aim to be fully representative of the work on this vast topic.
In the papers selected to illustrate the themes of this book I have not
been concerned so much with covering specific topics relating to the
many aspects of femininity and masculinity which have been written
about, as with structures of the mind. The Oedipus complex and
bisexuality, the first and last sections (Parts One and Four), define such
structures. In Parts Two and Three I address more specifically the central
issue I discussed in this introduction relating to the debate around the
question of whether femininity is or is not based on a lack, and more
generally to the relationship of body and mind.
Masculinity and femininity is a field of study probably more typified
by its disparity than by unity. A certain coherence in this collection of
papers comes from my own thesis, that the tension beween ‘anatomy is
destiny’ and keeping ‘psychoanalysis separate from biology’, which has
coloured the debate about female sexuality, has not gone away, that
attempts to resolve it by putting psychoanalysis firmly in the ‘symbolic’
register have proved unsatisfactory, and that a way forward is to make
theoretical use of the contradiction. Part Two addresses this issue
directly, while Part Three considers issues of body representation which
go beyond the ‘phallic question’.
Ultimately it is, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the underlying
phantasy which determines whether an act is masculine or feminine. But
the phantasy takes the body as its foundation and incorporates bodily
characteristics and sensations. Understanding masculinity and femininity
means understanding that interplay, means tolerating the out-of-focusness.
Notes
1 Lampl-de Groot in her 1927 paper, ‘The evolution of the Oedipus complex
in women’, pre-dated Freud’s understanding of the early attachment to the
mother, referring to it as the girl’s ‘negative Oedipus complex’, which she
believed was identical to the boy’s positive Oedipus complex.
2 Within academic and feminist circles the work of Lacan took on importance
in Britain following the publication of Mitchell’s book, Psychoanalysis and
Feminism (1974), written before she became a psychoanalyst.
3 Lacan also disregards the role of affects. His theory does not incorporate the
‘memories in feeling’ or indeed any pre-discursive phenomena which form
such a central part of British psychoanalytic theory.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 39
4
5
6
7
8
Green (1986) suggests that in the early years (the years to which Lacan
goes back) Freud placed an emphasis on representations rather than affect
because of his concern with demonstrability and scientific status and his
wish to keep psychoanalysis separate from hypnosis and catharsis, but in his
later work there is an increasing place given to affect, which is now granted
unconscious status.
In this sense there is always a three-person situation, something both Klein
and Lacan would agree on.
Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) even ask if we can really speak of a ‘preOedipal phase’ which implies a period characterized by a two-person
relationship between mother and child, since for Freud the father is present
at the beginning as a ‘troublesome rival’, and his use of the term ‘negative
complex’ may be more appropriate to his meaning.
Mack Brunswick suggests the use of the terms ‘active’ and ‘passive’ Oedipus
complex rather than positive and negative Oedipus complex. According to
this new terminology the pre-Oedipal sexuality of the girl becomes her
active Oedipus complex with the mother as its object; her passive Oedipus
complex has the father as its object. For the boy, the active Oedipus
complex denotes the positive Oedipus complex with the mother as object;
his passive Oedipus complex has as its object the father.
Klein’s interest in a femininity phase declined when she became interested
in the depressive position, that is, with the conflicts of love and hate towards
the same object.
The debate amongst feminist theoreticians continues around the role of the
body, with Braidotti, for instance, arguing that ‘feminist theoreticians should reconnect the feminine to the bodily sexed reality of the female’. See Sayers’
book, Biological Politics (1982), for a discussion of the place of biology within
feminism.
David (1975) uses the term ‘depersonation’ to contrast with ‘depersonalization’.
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PART ONE
The Oedipus complex
41
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Introduction
The Oedipus complex formed the kernel of Freud’s understanding of
human sexuality, and he comments: ‘None of the findings of
psychoanalytic research has provoked such embittered denials, such fierce
opposition—or such amusing contortions—on the part of critics as this
indication of the childhood impulses towards incest which persist in the
unconscious’. (Freud, SE4, 1900; footnote, 1914:263).
The tragic story of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his
mother, which is on the level of phantasy for the human individual, is
subject to repression. It is the unconsciousness of the desire (Oedipus did
not know they were his parents since he had been separated from them
at birth), as well as its prohibition, which describes human sexuality from
a psychoanalytic point of view. When Oedipus discovered his incestuous
actions he stabbed his eyes out (symbolic castration) and fled from the
land he had polluted. The prohibition of the incestuous act is what leads
the boy towards adulthood through repression of the desire and
identification with the father. The authority of the father or the parents is
introjected into the ego, forming the nucleus of the superego and
perpetuating the prohibition against incest. The libidinal trends are
desexualized and changed into impulses of affection.1
The recognition of sexual difference in classical theory has a
momentous but not identical consequence for the boy and the girl. The
sight of the female genital engenders in the boy the fear that he could
lose his penis, giving new, retrospective meaning to earlier threats of
castration or experiences of loss (of the feeding breast, of his own faeces).
In order to eschew this possibility, the boy abandons and represses his
wish to take his father’s place in relation to his mother.
The moment of recognition, on the other hand, arouses anger and
envy in the little girl, who up until then was ‘a little man’ in that she too
took her mother as her love object, her phallic strivings towards her
coming from her clitoris. Acceptance of ‘castration’, and the anger with
the mother who deprived her of a penis, will instigate her turning to her
43
44 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
father as her love object and to the babies he can give her as a substitute
for the penis. This desire will be gradually given up because it is never
fulfilled. Whereas the recognition of sexual difference and the fear of
castration ultimately leads to the dissolution of the Oedipus complex for
the boy, for her the recognition of sexual difference initiates the Oedipus
complex when she gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a
wish for a child,
and with that purpose in view she takes her father as a love-object.
Her mother becomes the object of her jealousy. The girl has turned
into a little woman…this new situation can give rise to physical
sensations which would have to be regarded as a premature awakening
of the female genital apparatus.
(Freud 1925:256)
The girl’s turn to the father is more than just a change of object, Freud
says. Active trends which have been frustrated are abandoned, and some
of the passive trends too. The transition to the father-object is
accomplished with the help of the passive trends in so far as they have
escaped the catastrophe. The path to the development of femininity now
lies open to the girl, to the extent to which it is not restricted by the
remains of the pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother which she has
surmounted. Because the turning to the father is accomplished with the
help of the passive trends, a masochistic attitude will be important to
female sexuality, while the narcissistic wound of her discovery of sexual
difference will lead her to identify her whole body with the phallus in a
narcissistic way. Because there is no threat of castration for the girl, the
Oedipus complex does not come to an abrupt end as it does for boys,
and hence the formation of the superego will suffer.
The Oedipus complex is still, as it was for Freud, considered to be
central to the development of masculinity and femininity, shaping
identifications, and central to the understanding of deviant sexual
development. All psychoanalysts agree upon this. What differs is the
timing of the Oedipus complex, what phenomena it encompasses and the
understanding of its origin, in particular the role of ‘castration’ in
instigating the girl’s Oedipus complex which only ‘classical’ theorists
uphold. Its ‘pre-history’ is now generally granted greater importance than
it had for Freud, but there is controversy as to what forms the Oedipus
complex, with Kleinian writers including manifestations from the pregenital phase, while for others the Oedipus complex denotes only those
manifestations of three-person attraction and rivalry which have a genital
basis. There is also a controversy as to when genital sensations take on
INTRODUCTION 45
Oedipal meaning, again with Kleinian authors dating this much earlier
than most.
The relationship between pre-Oedipal and Oedipal elements is
conceptualized in two different ways. In the one conceptualization, to
the classical Oedipus phase is added an earlier, discrete phase. This is Lamplde Groot’s perspective; she suggests that the separation of sexuality from
tenderness which Freud first described as common in men could be
understood in terms of the mother of the pre-Oedipal phase and the
mother of the Oedipal phase:
the admired and honored woman is chosen according to the mother
image of the period of the Oedipus complex. She is the heiress to the
great love of little Oedipus for Jocasta. The degraded sexual partner,
on the other hand, is the heiress to the image of the mother of the preOedipal phase: she has inherited the intense hostility that the little boy
may have felt for her. That hostility, in turn, stems from his early
ambivalence toward the mother and is reinforced by the fact that the
mother has later become his rival in his love for the father. The adult
man can vent his anger against the degraded sexual object; he can
mistreat her, can force her to satisfy all his needs and desires, even
perverse ones, and can compel her to attend to his wants as he wished
his mother to do when he was a little boy.
(Lampl-de Groot 1946:76)
In the other conceptualization. Oedipal and pre-Oedipal are more closely
interconnected. Blanck writes:
Although Freud applied the Oedipus myth to the normal family, it
does not describe a normal family constellation. The normal Oedipal
situation requires that there shall have been a pre-Oedipal family life
in which preponderantly positive self representations and positive
representations of both parents develop out of positive affective
experiences. These attenuate the murderous wishes of the Oedipal
phase. One questions whether the normally developing child can wish
unambivalently to kill the parent of the same sex with whom she or
he has built up positive cathexes over the pre-Oedipal years.
Murderous wishes have to be transient, not even necesssarily restricted
to Oedipal wishes, but more broadly attributable to normal quantities
of negative affect. I am not persuaded that the Oedipal wish can
overthrow all that went before, although I acknowledge its power.
(Blanck 1984:336)
46 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Blanck does at the same time recognize the Oedipus complex as ‘a
critical period in Spitz’s sense of convergence of drive maturation with
ego development’ (1984:337).
In the case of the girl, while Freud described a definite developmental
move from one object to the other following disappointment, the
relationships to mother and father are now conceived as more fluid.
Ogden (1987) points out that disruption of the pre-Oedipal relationship
to the mother as described by Freud at the time of the change of object
would be expected to lead to the erection of narcissistic and omnipotent
defences rather than to Oedipal love as the foundation of healthy love
relationships. The early relationship to the father is now recognized, and
there is seen to be a constant move between negative and positive
complex (Laufer 1984). The role of the father before the Oedipus
complex is recognized, both in his direct interaction with the child and
indirectly in consequence of his interaction with the mother (Formanek
1982). The role of the mother or the parent’s unconscious phantasies and
desires in structuring the sexuality of the child has been emphasized (Le
Guen 1984). Lichtenstein (1961) believes that the infant is given an
identity by the mother, he is ‘the organ, the instrument for the
fulfillment of the mother’s unconscious needs’.
For Klein’s followers there is an early Oedipus complex, early
femininity and no normal phallic phase since they do not accept the
theory of phallic monism (see also Blanck de Cereijido 1983). The
Oedipus complex is described as biologically determined since it does not
result from the perception of ‘castration’. Most other authors retain the
classic phallic phase, even when they describe an earlier ‘primary
femininity’, which modifies considerably the classical picture (Phyllis
Tyson). Edgcumbe and Burgner (1975) make a further distinction
between a ‘phallic-narcissistic phase’ during which the narcissistic
investment of sexually differentiated aspects of the body assumes
particular importance, and an ‘Oedipal phase’ in the later part of the
phallic phase when triangular Oedipal relationships are established.
Roiphe and Galenson (1980), using Mahler’s framework, suggest that
the rapprochement crisis is more troubled for girls than it is for boys,
because their recognition of sexual difference is not denied as it is by
boys and leads to a heightened aggressive aspect of the ambivalence to
the mother and a turning to the father, in preparation for the future
positive Oedipal constellation.
Using Klein’s later formulations, Kleinians make a distinction between
less mature (or early stages of) and more mature forms of the Oedipus
complex. While the paranoid-schizoid mode of functioning
predominates, the Oedipal conflict will be experienced in a very split
fashion (with one parent or part-object idealized and the other
INTRODUCTION 47
experienced as persecuting). The Oedipus complex in its more mature
form (which is the true Oedipus complex) is thought to be intrinsically
related to the depressive position in that it describes a relationship to
whole objects. In fact one could say that the traditional Oedipus story as
it is told, although referring to whole objects, operates at the level of
murder and talion, which is the paranoid-schizoid mode of functioning.
Segal suggests reserving the term ‘Oedipus complex’ for the relationship
to the parents as whole people of the depressive position, and that what
sometimes appears as an Oedipus complex is not a true triangular
relationship but the projection of the hated aspects of the breast onto the
penis. This will have the appearance only of an Oedipus complex in the boy.
Whatever the theoretical orientation, and whatever the debates about
what is true Oedipus complex and what is not, and about when to locate
it in time, the Oedipus complex is still generally thought to have a
fundamental role in the structuring of sexuality, in spite of the increasing
place given to pre-Oedipal or pre-genital phenomena. An important
difference remains around whether it is conceived of as developing in
progressive continuity or seen as imposing a distinctive new structure
which reorganizes and gives new meaning to earlier perceptions. For
instance, Denis (1982), taking up Freud’s own formulation, suggests that
although sexual differences are perceived early and play a role as
precursors, it takes an extra element (the Oedipus complex and
castration) to initiate later a Copernican revolution leading to all
differences being re-organized around the sexual difference, which then
takes on special and fundamental significance. Hence early bodily
experiences and parental attitudes become determining retrospectively.
Some contemporary Kleinians have shifted the perspective from the
classical Oedipus complex as described by Freud. They suggest that the
true Oedipus complex is recognizing the couple as a creative relationship
which produces the baby and recognizing the hate, jealousy and envy it
provokes.
The fantasies of going off with daddy or going off with mummy are
really defensive structures against those feelings, an Oedipal myth as
distinct from the reality underneath. Any deviation from sexuality of
that kind is an internal attack on the parents as a couple, and in that
sense is not really a complete healthy development.
(Segal 1990)
Britton (1989) calls them ‘Oedipal illusions’, intended to deny the
Oedipus situation.
Maxwell Gitelson, reviewing the role of pre-genital conflicts in
pathology, concluded in 1952 that ‘the Oedipus complex thus has a
48 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
typical importance not so much as the nucleus of the neuroses but as the
nucleus of normal character structure and as the basis of mature life’
(1952:354). This view is still generally held, in spite of the differences in
perspective.
The formative role of negative as well as positive Oedipal
constellations is also generally recognized. The papers of both Blos (1984)
and Laufer (1984) included in Part One, written on either side of the
Atlantic, one describing masculine development, the other feminine
development, illustrate current thinking which emphasizes a constant
fluctuation between positive and negative Oedipus complex rather than a
strictly linear development, and progressive change rather than discrete
times of trauma and resolution.
In his paper, Blos stresses the importance of the negative Oedipus
complex in the formation of masculine identity with its important roots
in the pre-Oedipal relationship to the father.
Eglé Laufer describes the vicissitudes of the girl’s giving up of the
phantasy of being able to keep the mother’s love for herself, which goes
along with her acceptance of ‘castration’; that is, the acceptance of her
body and of being of the same sex as the mother. She views this as ‘an
organizer’ which lays the foundation to her relationship to herself as a woman.
Part and parcel of the Oedipal situation is the recognition by both
sexes that the parents have a relationship to each other. Britton (1989)
describes in his paper, from a Kleinian perspective, the function of this
‘triangular space’ and the defensive manoeuvres and organizations which
take place when that recognition of the parental link cannot be tolerated.
Note
1 The Oedipus complex came to mean for Freud more than this ‘positive
version’ and to denote more broadly the child’s situation in the triangle,
both ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, thus emphasizing the centrality of
bisexuality.
1
Son and father
PETER BLOS
As the title of this presentation indicates, I shall limit myself to a narrowly
confined aspect of object relations. It is a topic that defies precise
circumscription partially due to its vast ramifications and to its still
contentious and unsettled place in psychoanalytic theory. The fact that
my chosen subject is one of momentous importance in human life
requires no persuasion nor testimony. In choosing it I emphasize a
current trend in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. I shall begin with
a brief overview of recent developments as well as the historical ones in
the orbit of son and father.
The discovery of the Oedipus complex, its fateful role in life and,
particularly, in neurosogenesis has led to an ever-deepening investigation
of its complexity. Originally, gender polarity represented a core
configuration in Oedipal conflict formation; this fact is still discernible
today in Oedipal terminology when we speak of the positive and the
negative Oedipus complex. For brevity’s sake I shall refer in this text
simply to the ‘positive complex’ or the ‘negative complex’. As far as I
propose modifications of their classical definitions, I trust that my
presentation as a whole will convey the qualifications in psychoanalytic
theory I intend to suggest.
The case of Dora permits us to contrast early and contemporary views
of Oedipal dynamics. Dora illustrates the pathogenic valence that Freud
(1905) attributed to the positive complex and its influence on her life,
even though he gave ample evidence of his suspicion or, indeed, his
conviction that the negative complex was at the root of her illness. This
he stated clearly in the case study itself (pp. 60–1) and in a letter to Fliess
(14 October 1900), even though it played a minor role in the analytic
work with the girl—at least, as far as we can glean from the clinical
report. The degree as well as the kind of pathogenic valence the clinician
assigns to pre-Oedipality and to one or the other of the two complexes
in their dynamic inter-play, often remain a matter of emphasis or
preconception. In contrast to the treatment of Dora, the pathogenicity of pre49
50 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Oedipal object relations is taken for granted in almost any case today, and
afforded a prominent place not only in the evolutionary history of a
given neurosis, but explicitly and increasingly in the analytic work itself.
The polarity of gender—son-mother, daughter-father—has dominated
the concept of the Oedipal constellation since its inception and has
weighed heavily in the etiologic formulation of the neurotic conflict.
However, clinical observations have attributed an increasingly persuasive
significance to isogender early object relations. Indeed, both
constellations, namely those of isogender and allogender partnership,
have received slowly, at times reluctantly, the recognition of equal
significance in the theoretical formulations of normal and pathological
development. This historical reference might sound groundless or
overstated at its first hearing, yet we cannot deny that the positive
complex and its resolution have received far more attention in the
analytic literature than the natural history as well as the resolution of the
negative complex ever has.
It was this extreme sparseness of investigations in male isogender
object relations from the earliest stages of development onward that
prompted me to inquire into these neglected issues. My analytic work
had convinced me that early isogender experiences not only dominate
and shape the son-father relationship at infancy, but influence critically
the boy’s creation of his self and object world for a lifetime. This
complexity of the son-father relationship has always been known, even if
never sufficiently illuminated. Freud has described the contrasting roles
played by the father in the son’s life.
The Oedipal father is by definition the restraining and punishing father
under whose threat of retaliation the little boy abandons his competitive
strivings, as well as his patricidal and incestuous animus. There has never
been any doubt that this father picture is incomplete and misleading
because we know that the typical father also acknowledges and elicits his
little son’s self-assertion; being emulated by the son fills the father with
pride and joy as does the junior toddler’s phallic, narcissistic and
exhibitionistic exuberance.
A well-known comment by Freud will remind us that we revisit old
and familiar territory: ‘As regards the prehistory of the Oedipus complex …
[W]e know that the period includes an identification of an affectionate
sort with the boy’s father’ (Freud 1925:250). This early experience of
being protected by the father and caringly loved by him becomes
internalized as a lifelong sense of safety in a Boschian world of horrors
and dangers. It seems to me that too exclusive a contribution to the sense
of bodily integrity has been attributed to the early mother. We have
ample occasion to observe in the analysis of adult men the enduring
influence of this father imago, especially when it remains unaltered by
SON AND FATHER 51
reality. The ‘overidealization of the analyst and analysis’ reflects the
father’s role in the child’s life during the first two years (Greenacre 1966).
The resistance aroused whenever the analytic work threatens to deprive
the patient of his father-illusion confirms the life-sustaining influence of
the early child-father relationship. The patient will not let go of it easily…
the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need
for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the
father’ (Freud 1927:30). The little boy seeks by active and persistent
solicitation the father’s approval, recognition and confirmation, thus
establishing a libidinal bond of a profound and lasting kind. Some
questions force themselves upon us: Where do the origins of those
affections lie? At which stage of object relations do they flourish? Under
what conditions do these hallmark emotions of the negative complex
seemingly vanish or what transformations do they undergo? One receives
the impression from the literature that the negative complex declines by
the ascendancy and subsequent resolution of the positive complex or, in
other words, that the fully developed triadic configuration effects by its
sheer ascension the resolution or transformation of the negative complex.
Of course, every analyst knows that this is not the case. Yet, until
recently, very little attention has been paid to the process or the timing of
this particular kind of isogender attachment resolution. We are presently
justified to say that the qualitative and pathogenic specificity of this
closeness derives from an unaltered perpetuity in the son-father
relationship, the beginnings of which are to be found in a quasi-maternal
bonding by substitution.
It is a well-known historical fact that with the establishment and
growth of child analysis the frontiers of psychoanalytic practice and,
consequently, of theory-building were pushed out farther and deeper
into the realms of infancy as well as adolescence, namely, into those two
epochs of life during which psychic structure formation, initiated by
physical maturation, proceeds on a grand scale. Detailed and direct child
observation provided a wealth of new and subtle details with regard to
psychic differentiation and developmental moves, thus amending and
altering in precision and complexity our previous knowledge of psychic
structure formation as derived from reconstruction. These exploratory
penetrations into the developmental terrains of both infancy and
adolescence delivered findings that enriched the general body of
psychoanalysis and, consequently, widened the scope of our science.
Instead of relying largely on the reconstruction of infantile trauma and
object relations, of internalization processes, of psychosexual and ego
development from the analysis of adults, it became possible to observe
them in their germinal states and follow their growth. Observing firsthand what had previously been largely inferred, enhanced our
52 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
knowledge of a more exact schedule—comprising sequences and timing—
of infantile and adolescent development.
As a first consequence of psychoanalytic infant research, the preOedipal mother moved prominently to center-stage, eclipsing Oedipality
to a considerable degree in the etiological determination of mental
disturbances as they became manifest later in life. By virtue of
distinguishing more clearly the pre-Oedipal determinants in
pathogenicity generally, the limits and the criteria of analyzability became
more sharply delineated. What I want to call attention to at this point is
the importance of the pre-Oedipal father in the life of the male child.
Here we find ourselves on territory not yet fully charted, but with
sufficiently explored contours of the terrain to know in which directions
to advance our search. The findings just alluded to not only have
changed our knowledge of timing as to paternal recognition by the
infant, but have also drawn a sharper outline of the earliest stages of
parental imitation, internalization and identification. The dating of core
gender identity to an earlier period relegates many classical
psychoanalytic tenets of psychosexual development to the archives of our
science.
I have devoted the major portion of my professional life to the
investigation of the adolescent process. Adolescence thus became the
focus of my clinical observations from which my theoretical constructs
radiated backwards and forwards into the proto-adolescent and the metaadolescent stages of the life cycle. I refer here to my adolescent research
because the theme of this paper is launched from these observations and
their theoretical inferences. Edging my way into the substance of this
presentation, I state now a proposition which I advanced some years ago.
I share the well-established opinion that the male child arrives at a
resolution of the positive complex prior to his entry into latency, but
beyond that, I have postulated that his negative complex, having its
origin in the dyadic stage of object relations, survives in a repressed, more
or less unaltered, state until adolescence (Blos 1974). Developmentally
speaking, the necessity arises to differentiate between a dyadic and a
triadic positive and negative complex.
Whatever course the individual resolution of the positive complex will
take, its achievement is always reflected in the formation of a new
structure, the superego. Dual parental pre-Oedipal determinants are
always recognizable in the final superego structure. What appears,
however, to acquire prominence in the male superego is the dominant
voice of the father principle which is, at its dyadic origin, not yet
instinctually conflicted but belongs to a pre-competitive, idealizing stage
of the ‘good father’. Both father and mother complex operate at this level
more or less reactively and compensatorily rather than in an antagonistic
SON AND FATHER 53
libidinal entanglement. The prototypical dyadic split into pleasure and
unpleasure parental figures precludes by its very nature the formation of
an internal conflict. This pre-conflictual state is further upheld by the
attribution of pain to the external world, the ‘not-me’ realm of
perception and the attribution of pleasure to the ‘me’ experience,
inclusive of the pleasure object; within this dawning affective awareness
lies the emergence of the self. Precursors of this process are apparent from
early infancy on; they become organized and stabilized in psychic
structure with the decline of the Oedipal phase. All this is wellestablished psychoanalytic knowledge. It is also well known that positive
and negative components of the complex are inseparably intertwined but
nevertheless distinguishable by the preponderance or dominance of one
or the other in their constant ebb and flow. Alongside these
differentiating processes in the male child—so I submit—the negative
complex is not subjected to as radical a transformation during pre-latency
as the positive one is. In other words, its definitive transformation into
psychic structure is delayed until adolescence.
With the advent of sexual maturation arrives the biological imperative
for definitive and irreversible sexual identity; as a coefficient of this
imperative we can isolate, observe and define adjunct identities of a
social, cognitive and self-representational nature. They form in their
synergic evolution the post-latency personality. This process of psychic
restructuring affects every facet of the adolescent’s life and promotes
forcefully the terminal resolution of the negative complex. What had
appeared to me earlier in my work as the resuscitation of the positive
complex which, by deflection, transformation and displacement turns in
an apparently predetermined fashion to extra-familial heterosexual objectfinding, gradually acquired in my clinical judgment the character of a
largely defensive operation. Here I have in mind the fact that the boy’s
dyadic father relationship which fluctuated between submission, selfassertion and sharing the father’s grandeur is drawn into the sexual realm
with the advent of puberty. The regressive pull is counteracted by sexual
gender assertion. I came to see ever so clearly that this defense springs
into action in the wake of a resurgence of the boy’s negative complex
which reaches, at puberty, the apex of its conflictuality.
The defensive state I speak of is transitory in nature and declines with
the definitive resolution of the negative complex at the closure of
adolescence. I am fully aware that this exposition does not tell the whole
story, but I highlight here intentionally what appears to me a neglected
stage in the ontogeny of mature male object relations and of the mature
self. This particular comprehension of male sexuality at adolescence
gained further clarity and plausibility from the analytic observation that
inordinate, compulsive, heterosexual activity or, conversely, anxiety
54 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
arousal due to heterosexual inaction or passivity, subsided markedly with
the resolution of the negative complex. I noticed that the decline of this
conflict introduces a kind of heterosexual attachment behaviour which
possesses a different quality: to this we refer as a mature (or more mature)
love relationship in which the defensive nature of the attachment has
dropped away and recognition as well as appreciation can be extended to
the uniqueness of the partner as a whole person. When the defensive
quality of the immature bonding between sexually mature partners has
gradually dissipated, then the formation of the adult personality is
reasonably assured.
The termination of adolescence constitutes a critical and contributory
stage in the formation of the adult neurosis. Indeed, it is the persistent
incapacity of the young man to surmount his negative complex which
leads to the consolidation of the manifest and definitive neurosis of his
adult life. By inferring that the Oedipus complex as a dynamic totality
does not yield normally to a post-Oedipal level of object relations until
the closure of adolescence, I simultaneously postulate that the
structuralization of the adult neurosis cannot be thought of as completed
until adolescence has passed. I shall not elaborate here on the far-reaching
consequences of the adolescent process, delivered or aborted, on the
ultimate attainment of emotional maturity or psychopathology, but
continue on the path that brings us closer to the core of my presentation.
In accordance with the Oedipal schema just outlined, I am now ready
to say that the resolution of the Oedipus complex in its totality advances
in a biphasic fashion: the resolution of the positive component precedes
latency—in fact, facilitates its formation—while the resolution of the
negative component has its normal timing and takes its normal course in
adolescence or, to be more precise, in late adolescence when it facilitates
the entry into adulthood. This schema became further complicated by
my analytic observation that the flight of the adolescent boy to the father,
defensively manifested by rising oppositionalism and aggression, is usually
commensurate to the intensity and urgency of the son’s need for a
protective closeness to him vis-à-vis the magnetic and mysterious female
to whom he is irresistibly drawn. This drive constellation is too
frequently and too readily identified with homosexuality; such a
simplistic equation demands a vigorous disclaimer. What we observe is
the male’s defensive struggle against passivity in general, not against
homosexuality in particular. I must insert at this point that I am aware of
having left aside some well-known and relevant facts about the boy’s
competitive and antagonistic struggle with the Oedipal father. After all,
adolescence is the stage in life when the universal polarities of active and
passive are in conflict and in final combat on a Promethean scale. In the
analysis of the adolescent boy it is imperative that this double-faceted
SON AND FATHER 55
defensive struggle—against submissiveness and passivity as well as against selfassertion and patricide—becomes disentangled. How this dilemma
appeared in a treatment and was acted out in the transference, I shall
illustrate with a clinical episode.
A late-adolescent boy had reacted for some time to my interpretations
of his violent behaviour toward his parents, especially the father, as proof
of my taking sides with them and considering his accusatory and
demeaning comments about them as amoral and demented. This reaction
had reached paranoid proportions. I abstained from interpreting his
acting out in the transference because I knew that repeated
interpretations too often lose their credibility. During a session which I
shall now describe, the patient accused me in a highly agitated state of
thinking of him as a helpless and weak child, scared to stand up against
his father. He was obviously trying to pick a fight with me and stand his
ground. When his shouting attack mounted and threatened to get out of
hand, I told him firmly and stentorially that he had to stop telling me
what is on my mind or leave. His outburst suddenly subsided; he became
calm and pensive. After a long silence, he said quietly: ‘I just remembered
a dream I had last night. I am wrestling with my father, not fighting, just
wrestling. Suddenly I feel that I’m coming—I cannot control it—I get
panicky and I yell: “No, no—I don’t want to make up with you!” I
repeat these words again and again, getting more and more desperate. I
can’t stop the orgasm. I have it.’ After the recall of this dream neither
patient nor analyst had much difficulty in recognizing son and father’s
sporty playfulness which was a rare event in the boy’s early and middle
childhood. ‘I hardly ever played with my father. He was not there—
especially when I was afraid of my mother. I saw just enough of him—or
perhaps more than enough of my mother—to know how much I missed
him.’ The dream reflects the son’s present struggle between a murderous
defense against submission and a passionate yearning for paternal
acknowledgment of his manhood. The paranoid reverberations of his
past, examined in the struggle of his adolescent life, freed the young man
from the fixation on the pre-Oedipal father and facilitated his advance
toward the Oedipal level. Alongside this developmental progression, the
compulsive and defensive need for ‘having sex’ gave way to a wish and a
budding capacity to form a relationship of a sexual as well as a personal,
emotional and romantic nature.
Returning to the discussion of analytic developmental theory, I must
admit that much of what I had attributed to the triadic relationship in my
first realization of the adolescent boy’s libidinal attachment to the father
had to be relegated to the dyadic phase. In other words, the father of the
negative complex is intrinsically fused with the father of the pre-Oedipal
period. The regressive pull to the father of the dyadic phase becomes
56 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
apparent when the adolescent boy is viewed in a developmental
continuum, as outlined above. Pursuing this course of thinking and
developmental allocation in the analytic work with adolescent boys and
adult men, it became apparent to me that the loved and loving father of
the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal period (that is, the father of the negative
complex) ascends to a paramount conflictual position at the terminal
stage of adolescence. Once alerted to this phenomenon, I became used to
its omnipresence as a normal constituent of the male adolescent process
and I gradually desisted from relegating the manifestations of these
inordinate passions to the realm of abnormal development or Oedipal
psychopathology. It is no uncommon observation, especially if derived
from the microscopic scrutiny of the tidal currents of emotions as is
possible in analytic work, that isogender libidinal drives break through
after their relative calm of the latency years has passed. These urges do
not represent prima facie a homosexual inclination or disposition, but
rather confirm that the normal adolescent formation of male sexual
identity is on its way. What we observe, then, are the emotional and
expressive manifestations of the normal negative complex in transition.
As early as 1951, Loewald made the following comment of a general
developmental nature: ‘Against the threat of the maternal engulfment the
paternal position is not another threat of danger, but a support of
powerful force.’ Mahler (1955) confirmed this finding by saying that ‘the
stable image of a father or of another substitute of the mother, beyond
the eighteen-months mark and even earlier, is beneficial and perhaps a
necessary prerequisite [italics added] to neutralize and to counteract the egocharacteristic oversensibility of the toddler to the threat of re-engulfment
by the mother’. Of course, both statements refer in equal measure to boy
and girl infant. A psychoanalytic researcher and clinician who paid
particular attention to the development of the early relationship between
infant and father during the dyadic period is Abelin (1971, 1975; Panel
1978); Ross (1977, 1979) has written a comprehensive overview of the
literature that deals with the role of the father in the development of the
young child from its beginnings through the early formative years; and
Herzog (1980) has contributed original research in this field.
Returning to the mainstream of my deliberations, I have so far
submitted two theoretical statements which are the outcome of my
analytic work with adolescent boys. As the next step, I endeavour to
integrate them into the body of psychoanalytic theory, its schema of
development, and the dynamics of neurosogenicity. One of the two
propositions, as stated above, attributes to adolescence the final resolution
of the negative complex, implying that the resolution of the Oedipus
complex proceeds in a biphasic progression. The other proposition states
that much of what had been generally attributed to the revival of the
SON AND FATHER 57
Oedipal father in adolescence is more profitably understood—as to origin
and nature—if related to the pre-Oedipal father imago of the dyadic
period. Such an adjudication requires some evidence to be persuasive.
At this point a differentiation—even a tentative and incomplete one—
between the son-father relationship of the dyadic and of the triadic
period should be welcome. The pre-Oedipal father takes over from the
early mother some significant portions of the infantile attachment
emotions, inclusive of the split in good and bad object. Should the father
at this stage serve only as a simple replacement of the mother, then the
relationship can be expected to become pathogenic; should the father,
however, be perceived and used differently by his son, then a healthy
expansion and enrichment of the child’s incipient personality becomes
discernible. The father assumes for the little boy, early in life, a
charismatic quality in his physical presence which is different in its
constitutional disposition and bodily responsiveness from that of the
mother. The respective quality of the way the father or the mother holds
the infant or plays with him demonstrates well the variance or disparity
of which I speak. The father of the dyadic period is indeed a facilitator
who, in conjunction with the mother, activates the individuation process
and finally becomes for his son a saviour from the beckoning regression
and the threatening re-engulfment during the rapprochement subphase
(Mahler 1955). This father, i.e. the dyadic father, has been called
‘uncontaminated’ due to the fact that he has never been a full-fledged
symbiotic partner. He belongs to the post-differentiation, preambivalent, idealizing stage of early object relations. Jealousy is indeed
noticeable and so is the quest for total object possession. However, the
son’s turn to the father is not yet affected or burdened by sexual jealousy,
patricidal conflict and retaliatory anxiety. These emotional discordances
belong to the father of the Oedipal era. The idea of a belated resolution
of the negative complex at adolescence forced itself on my mind by the
eloquent role this emotional conflict plays in the analysis of every male
adolescent.
When I once made a comment to an older male adolescent about his
complacent, unconflicted and timeless dwelling in analysis, he responded
with the recall of a blissful feeling, similar to the one that suddenly had
welled up in him when I spoke. He remembered the precious occasions
when he was permitted as a little boy to sit quietly in his father’s study
while his father worked at his desk. He re-experienced in the analytic
situation the dyadic bliss of his childhood. In pursuit of this recollection,
he came to realize that his life-long thirst for great accomplishments and
fame was not only due to the meekly attempted and prematurely
abandoned competition with his father, but—more basically—it
embodied his passionate quest for his father’s love, indeed, for union and
58 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
oneness with him. When the patient gleaned this insight through the
vehicle of transference interpretations he was deeply moved and said: ‘It
feels like being accepted for the first time in my father’s arms or to have a
life of my own, not just playing at it.’ I came to realize that what
originally had led to the neurotic stalemate was his need for dyadic
bonding which, in turn, left only make-believe or inauthentic action
open to him in his never-ending effort to transcend his fixation.
The dyadic father attachment and the sharing of father-greatness
became arrested in this case on the level of reflection and imitation. It
never progressed to the level of identification. He admired the father
who could work, while he, the son, could only keep frantically busy,
propelled by exalted anticipations. In his despair of ever fulfilling his
father’s expectations and giving him the pleasure of gratification, the
young man finally blamed his father for not using his extraordinary mind
to the fullest and doing great things which, in turn, would provide the
son with hope and trust in himself by reflection. The awareness of his
emotional father involvement was summarized by the patient saying: ‘If
I’ll ever be able to let anything or anybody go for good—and what else is
growing up all about—I have first to say goodbye to my father.’ We
might paraphrase his words to read: ‘goodbye to my pre-Oedipal father.’
The character pathology of this case was one of a pernicious, debilitating
pseudo purposefulness and incompleteness of action. The patient’s insight
into the problems just outlined led to a forward move toward
identifications along the father series of which the analyst was one if not,
indeed the first. The fact that the patient could not tolerate the deidealization of the father at adolescence fixated his emotional
development at the terminal stage of childhood, thus consolidating his
neurosis on the threshold to adulthood. I speak here of the adolescent deidealization of the father as a symbolic patricide which sets the son free
by setting into motion the de-idealization of the self.
At this point I have to introduce a correction in the portrayal of the
dyadic son-father relationship of which—I fear—I have inadvertently
given too idyllic a picture. What has to be introduced are the father’s
ambivalent emotions towards his infant son which throw dark shadows
over his infantile exuberance and lust for life. Even when love, pride and
devotion are the father’s manifest emotions, negative feelings drift into
the relationship. They usually are not acknowledged by the father; they
remain unconscious. However, if not neutralized to some degree, they
tend to affect adversely the early son-father attachment. The father who
harbors feelings of envy, resentment and death wishes toward his son is
dramatically represented in the Greek myth by King Laius who set out to
kill his infant son Oedipus by abandoning him in the wilderness to
certain death. The inference that the unnatural deed Laius committed
SON AND FATHER 59
was initiated by the voice of the oracle only speaks of the ubiquitous
danger of hostile emotions which the birth of an infant son unleashes in
the father. Normally they are reduced to insignificance under the onrush
of joy and elation evoked by paternity. Ross (1982) has written a
persuasive paper on this issue, designating this particular component of
the son-father configuration as the Laius complex which every son has to
face when he becomes the father of a son.
Two comments are in order here. One refers to a component of the
common oppositional and self-assertive stance of the son vis-à-vis the
father as a defense against passivity. This dynamic explication is
convincingly supported by the fact that the analysis of repressed passivity
transmutes disorganized and disorganizing oppositionalism into adaptive
and organized behavior, solidifying in its course a stable as well as
harmonious sense of self. The second comment refers to the theme,
which I shall call the search for the loving and loved father. This facet of
the father complex assumes in adolescence a libidinal ascendancy that
impinges on every fact of the son’s emotional life. The quality of this
longing as observed in male infants has been called ‘father hunger’ by
Herzog (1980) or ‘father thirst’ by Abelin (Panel 1978). The terminology
itself expresses both authors’ assumption that the affect of father-yearning
is experienced in early childhood within the oral modality.
The resolution of the Oedipus complex finds its ultimate completion
in the resolution of the pre-Oedipal father relationship at adolescence.
This statement does not alter nor invalidate the overriding importance of
the boy’s conflict with the Oedipal father, but addresses itself to an
intrinsic component of the male father complex as a whole. Clinically,
the theorem is not restricted to adolescence because it assumes, more
often than not, a major role in the analysis of the male adult. The fact of
not having surmounted or resolved the father complex, as in the case of
an aborted adolescence, lays bare its pathogenic role in the neurotic
nexus of any adult male patient. I shall illustrate the theorem just outlined
as it emerged in the analysis of a middle-aged man. His emotional
bondage to his father was as extreme as his father’s unrelatedness to his
son and his uncompromising need that his son submit to his will. Way
into manhood, the patient was shaken by the fear that the slightest show
of self-assertion vis-à-vis his father would leave him disinherited, namely
abandoned, starving, lost. The love for his father—which indeed was
‘father hunger’—emerged in the analysis and was acknowledged. In an
outburst of tears and sobbing, he stammered the words: ‘I love that man.’
Consciously, the son had resented and hated the father all his life.
Entering analysis, he announced: ‘I cannot hate my father for the rest of
my life. It kills me.’ A recent succession of anxiety attacks and a turn to
heavy drinking brought this tortured man to psychoanalytic treatment. In
60 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
contrast to hating his father, he had always adored his mother about
whom nothing disparaging could ever be said. It was only after the
analysis of the negative complex that he could see her in a new light. He
began to express doubts about her loving nature. Scrutinizing his illusory
positive complex he found an old, managerial caretaker who had ‘never
hugged or kissed me.’ The patient realized that he had cast her in a
madonna image when his desire for emotional closeness to his father had
become a lost cause. Now the adult son could say: ‘I loved my father too
much.’ He ceased to endear himself to father figures and concomitantly
he ceased to canonize women. With these changes, his addictiveness
faded away and so did his compulsive and superficial and promiscuous
relatedness to women.
As a cogent complement to my analytic experience just cited, I am
reminded of Freud’s remark about the girl’s resolution of her Oedipus
complex. In his work with women patients he was struck by the fact that
the positive complex pales into insignificance with the deepening of the
analytic work, while the negative complex moves to the forefront. The
analysis of the Oedipus complex—and Freud refers here to its positive
component as the one subjected to analysis—comes to a standstill. Freud
(1924) writes: ‘At this point our material—for some incomprehensible
reason—becomes far more obscure and full of gaps’ (p. 177). In the
perplexing pursuit of this problem he came to realize that the preOedipal period exerts an influence on the emotional development of
women that equals or even exceeds the influence of the positive Oedipal
position. Freud (1931) states ‘it would seem as though we must retract
the universality of the thesis that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus of
the neuroses.’ He concludes, that ‘this correction’ is not necessary if we
include in the Oedipus complex the negative component of the girl’s
exclusive attachment to the mother and realize that the girl reaches the
positive position only after ‘she has surmounted a period before it that is
governed by the negative complex’ (p. 226).
What arouses my attention in this context is the fate of the dyadic
father in the boy’s formation of the positive complex or, more
specifically, the fate of the negative complex, its resolution and its
neurosogenic valence. It should be obvious that this comment of mine
refers to a far broader context than that of homosexuality. In fact, it
would be appropriate and clinically supportable if we made a
differentiation between the boy’s negative complex of the triadic
constellation and the boy’s dyadic father complex, which belongs to an
earlier stage of object relations, as well as their respective influence on a
man’s love life and on his sense of self.
I hasten to add that the residues or fixations pertaining to the positive
complex are as clearly apparent throughout male adolescence as we have
SON AND FATHER 61
always considered them to be. However, our attention is aroused by the
boy’s conflictual, i.e. active and passive, father engagement and
disengagement, both reflecting a specific quality of emotional exigency
and motivational forcefulness.
Contemplating the period of the pre-competitive son-father
attachment as well as the confidence and security the little boy derives
from his father’s control and domination, the conjecture presents itself
that an indestructible residue of this early father-trust carries over into the
tumultuous arena of the triadic struggle. This is to say that the restraining
and punishing father is also the rescuer of the son from being taken over
by infantile delusions; this so-called rescuer is the early personification of
the reality principle who makes growing into manhood an attainable
expectancy.
I have traced a roadblock in the path toward this achievement to a
father’s need for an intense closeness to his isogender infant offspring; in
this closeness, the father gratifies vicariously and belatedly his lifelong
father hunger. An emotional involvement of this kind always comprises a
three-generational network. Under these auspices a potentially liberating
infantile attachment turns into an oppressive bondage. One might say
that the abandoned seduction theory has re-entered here along an
unexpected course and in an unexpected guise.
I have observed this kind of interaction between father and son in the
analyses of several men who derived excessive pleasure from the
caretaking ministrations of their infant son. In one case the child
responded to the father’s need by becoming a nightly visitor to his bed,
always bypassing the mother. No disciplinary interference could keep the
now four-year-old child in his room because he kept responding to the
father’s unrelenting, unconscious wishes for physical and emotional
closeness to him. When the patient’s deprivation of physical and
emotional contact with his early father emerged in the analysis, the little
boy began to listen to the request to stay in his room. The nightly
commuting to the father’s bed faded away with the patient’s mounting
realization that he gratified vicariously his own pre-Oedipal ‘father
hunger’ via his little son’s bodily closeness.
In a considerable number of my adult male patients, ranging in age
from their twenties way into their late fifties, the negative complex
appears often as the rock bottom of their neurotic illness. I remind you
here of Freud’s 1931 paper on female sexuality which I quoted earlier.
There, he calls attention to some of his women patients’ allencompassing fixation on the pre-Oedipal mother lying at the root of
their neuroses. One cannot help but wonder why the boy’s negative
complex, being of equal neurosogenic valence, has never received an
equal measure of attention. This neglectfulness persisted despite the fact—
62 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
as quoted by Mack Brunswick (1940) in her classic paper (written in
collaboration with Freud) on the pre-Oedipal phase—that Freud had
commented at the time: ‘on the basis of this new concept of early female
sexuality, the pre-Oedipal phase of the boy should be thoroughly
investigated’ (p. 266). This admonition was never fully heeded.
The residues of the pre-Oedipal attachment experience of son to
father lie, to a large extent, buried under a forceful repression once
adolescence is passed. This infantile emotional experience, when roused
into reanimation during analysis, remains usually inaccessible by sheer
verbalization. It finds expression via affectomotor channels, such as
uncontrollable weeping and sobbing, while the patient is tormented by
overwhelming feelings of love and loss in relation to the dyadic father.
One man in his fifties exclaimed at such a moment, choked by tears:
‘Why did I love my father so much—after all, I had a mother.’ In
contrast to these passionate affects, the manifest and remembered sonfather relationship had usually been distant, often hateful, admiring or
submissive, governed by fear of rejection and grudgeful with a sense of
disappointment.
The foremost structural achievements of both Oedipal conflict
resolutions at the imminence of latency and, later, of adulthood, are
respectively the superego and the adult ego ideal. The male superego
preserves for good the circumstances of its origin, namely, the
interdiction of incest under the threat of chastisement; it remains an
agency of prohibition. The infantile ego ideal, in proximity to object
idealization, promotes a forward move in libidinal disengagement,
identified in psychoanalytic theory with ‘the decline of the Oedipus
complex’. In contrast, the adult ego ideal is an agency of autonomous
aspiration; as such it is guarded as a cherished and beloved personality
attribute whose archaic origin lies in father attachment, father idealization
or, briefly, in the negative complex, i.e., the adult ego ideal is the heir to
the negative Oedipus complex. ‘Genetically’ as Bibring (1964)
commented, ‘it [the ego ideal] derives its strength mainly from positive
libidinal strivings in contrast to the superego, in which aggressive forces
prevail’ (p. 517). This view is supported by the clinical fact that the adult
ego ideal holds unambivalently to its position, once acquired, with
steadfast loyalty. Here Nunberg’s (1932) comment comes to mind:
‘Whereas the ego submits to the superego out of fear of punishment, it
submits to the ego ideal out of love’ (p. 146). It seems that without the
dual challenge of Oedipal anxiety and guilt as well as pre-Oedipal father
attachment and father hunger, the personality development of the boy is
seriously endangered; a disposition in the direction of social and libidinal
malfunction might be in store for him. To particularize the inferences I
SON AND FATHER 63
just made, I submit a contribution from the phenomenology of the ego
ideal in transition during adolescence.
We are familiar with the adolescent boy’s proverbial hero worship and
his search for models of emulation, characteristically expressed in his
construction of a personal hall of fame. We observe that the personalities
on posters and albums, inhabiting the inner sanctum of the adolescent’s
world, represent his transient but intense idealizations and trial
identifications. These imaginary relationships, while highly emotional,
are devoid of sexual, i.e. genital constituents and are—due to sublimatory
transformations—devoid of infantile attachment emotions. The egosyntonic affects are exclusively those of admiration, idealization and
devotion to the respective hero’s qualities of excellence and perfection,
most frequently attached to personalities in the field of sports, music or
stage. The bearers of these qualities are predominantly acclaimed
performers and almost exclusively male. We witness here in statu nascendi
the socialization of the infantile ego ideal alongside the structuring of the
adult ego ideal during adolescence.
Adolescence cannot be comprehended by the classical psychoanalytic
recapitulation theory because certain emotional experiences and tasks do
not find their normal timing until adolescence, when the developmental
progression confronts the child with novel, maturationally evoked,
conflictual constellations. A major one is singled out for my deliberation
in this paper. The event of sexual maturation, i.e. puberty, is the
biological signal that the passing of childhood has arrived; any undue
prolongation of it becomes an indication of a developmental derailment.
The shift in object choice or the adolescent displacement of the primary
love object is well understood in the son-mother relationship. What is
less understood is the fate of the son’s libidinal father attachment. Simple
displacement along isogender lines is observed only when a durable
fixation prevents libidinal modulation to advance in puberty toward a
heterosexual identity. Simple displacement onto object relations of the
father series will endanger the son’s heterosexual identity or weaken,
indeed prevent, its formation and irreversible constancy.
Having discarded the protective envelope of childhood, the
safekeeping of purpose and meaning of life passes over into the
guardianship of the self. I conceive the dynamics of this personality
change as intrinsically related to the resolution of the dyadic father
relationship which becomes increasingly divested of infantile dependency
needs. In other words, its resolution in the male is not and cannot be
effected by object displacement, but only by the formation of a new
psychic institution, which is to say, by a structural innovation. I
postulated that the object libido which gave life to the negative complex
is compelled and propelled by sexual maturation to undergo a
64 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
transformation into a psychic structure which is sustained by narcissistic
libido. In this new structure I recognized the adult ego ideal (Blos 1974).
The proposition of a biphasic resolution of the Oedipus complex
would logically be followed by the conclusion that the definitive
organization of the adult neurosis has its timing during the terminal stage
of adolescence. It is stating the obvious to say that contributary and
essential contributions to the construction of a neurotic illness are
identifiable all through the stages of proto-adolescent development.
Evoking the image of the arch, it is also obvious that its construction
remains incomplete and its ultimate self-support and solid rigidity are not
achieved until the keystone is dropped into place. In an analogous
fashion, the definitive neurosis, i.e. the adult neurosis, remains
incomplete until the closure of adolescence declares that the
psychobiological period, called childhood, is passed. Whenever a
derailment of the phase-specific differentiation in object relations or an
abnormal consolidation of psychic structure occurs during childhood, the
developmental injury meets a last chance of spontaneous healing during
adolescence. Beyond that, temperamental ingenuity and ego
resourcefulness present a myriad of adaptational potentials, one of which
is the neurotic compromise, the neurosis. The assertion that the decline
of the Oedipus complex proceeds in two stages of pre-adulthood implies
the view that psychological childhood comes to its close at the end of
adolescence. To this assertion has to be added that the dyadic isogender
attachment experience of the male child contributes a basic determinant
in the neurotic formations as they appear later in his life. I would not be
surprised if the outcome of my research and its claim for amendments to
the classical theory are met both with agreement and incredulity. I do
acknowledge that my propositions are not supported by extensive
research. All I can ask from the audience is a response of critical attention
and a testing by clinical observation.
I mentioned earlier in this presentation that the dyadic state operates in
polarities which are reflected in the split into the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ object.
The cognitive level of thought, when restricted to the exclusive use of
polarities, is of a primitive nature and of limited efficiency because
complexities are dealt with in terms of simple dichotomies. The advance
to the triadic level lifts the thought process onto a higher level or, rather,
it establishes the precondition for this advance. We might say the triadic
complexity of object relations and its implicit experience of a higherlevel conflict produce an infinite multitude of possible diversity within its
realm; of these, a selected few are retained and stabilized in transcending
the triadic stage. The Oedipal complexity of interpersonal experiences is
reflected on the cognitive level in the emergence of the dialectic process.
We recognize in this process the triadic nature of thesis, antithesis and
SON AND FATHER 65
synthesis. The complexity of this thought process permits by the choice
of determinations an endless sequence of possible cognitive combinations
or permutations, each pressing forward toward a resolution on an ever
higher level of thought.
From postulating a biphasic resolution of the Oedipus complex it
would follow by implication that the so-called higher levels of thought
make their appearance at the time of its terminal resolution, which
occurs at the adolescent period. This theoretical assumption finds a
validation in the adolescent research by Inhelder and Piaget (1958). To
quote: The adolescent is an individual who begins to build “systems” or
“theories” in the largest sense of the term…the adolescent is able to
analyze his own thinking and construct theories’ (p. 339). The capacity
to execute such mental operations declares the readiness of the adolescent
mind to deal with the abstractions inherent in ideologies, philosophy,
epistemology and science. The child does not possess a thought faculty of
this kind. The researchers claim that these higher thought constructs
serve the purpose of furnishing ‘the cognitive and evaluative bases for the
assumption of adult roles. They are vital in the assimilation of the values
which delineate societies or social classes as entities in contrast to simple interindividual relations’ (p. 340).
I have commented that the primitivity of thought, anchored in dyadic
affectivity, stands in stark contrast to the intricacy of the dialectic thought
process. The triadic state is concerned with self, object and identity, as
well as with object-directed emotional and sexual issues; it transcends, so
to say, its infantile origin and instinctual involvement by perpetuating its
existential nature in the cognitive sphere, namely, in the interminable
effort to comprehend the world and the self in ever more complex terms
and configurations.
Summary
I have traced in my deliberations the mutual influence of drive and ego
development throughout the male child’s dyadic and triadic fatherrelatedness as it proceeds within a changing soma and social surround
during the first two decades of life. I have made the effort to
conceptualize the normal developmental progression in male personality
formation with explicit reference to the fate of the boy’s dyadic fatherrelationship as well as his negative Oedipus complex in general. These
considerations, restricted as they are in scope and gender, assign to the
dyadic father complex a nuclear role in neurosogenesis as well as
recognize in it an etiological factor in relation to specific forms of
psychopathology throughout the male life cycle.
66 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Note
Plenary lecture presented at the Fall Meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, New York, 17 December 1982.
References
Abelin, E. (1971). The role of the father in the separation-individuation
process. In Separation-Individuation: Essays in Honor of Margaret S.Mahler,
ed. J.B. McDevitt & C.F.Settlage. New York: Int. Univ. Press, pp. 229–52.
——(1975). Some further observations and comments on the earliest role of
the father, Int. J. Psychoanal., 56:293–302.
Bibring, G.L. (1964). Some considerations regarding the ego ideal in the
psychoanalytic process. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 12:517–21.
Blos, P. (1974). The genealogy of the ego ideal. Psychoanal. Study Child, 29: 43–88.
Freud, S. (1887–1902). The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess,
Drafts and Notes. New York: Basic Books, 1954.
——(1905). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. S.E., 7:7–122.
——(1924). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. S.E., 19.
——(1925). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction
between the sexes. S.E., 19.
——(1927). The future of an illusion. S.E., 21.
——(1931). Female sexuality. S.E., 21.
Greenacre, P. (1966). Problems of overidealization of the analyst and of
analysis. Psychoanal. Study Child, 21:193–211.
Herzog, J.M. (1980). Sleep disturbance and father hunger in 18- to 28-monthold boys. Psychoanal. Study Child, 35:219–33.
Inhelder, B. & Piaget, J. (1958). The Growth of Logical Thinking from
Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books.
Loewald, H.W. (1951). Ego and reality. Int. J. Psychoanal, 32:10–18.
Mack Brunswick, R. (1940). The preoedipal phase of libido development.
In The Psychoanalytic Reader, ed. R.Fliess. New York: Int. Univ. Press,
1948, pp. 261–84.
Mahler, M.S. (1955). On symbiotic child psychosis. Psychoanal. Study Child,
10: 195–212.
Nunberg, H. (1932). Principles of Psychoanalysis. New York: Int. Univ. Press,
1955.
Panel (1978). The role of the father in the preoedipal years. R.C.Prall,
reporter. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 26:143–61.
Ross, J.M. (1977). Toward fatherhood: the epigenesis of paternal identity
during a boy’s first decade. Int. Rev. Psychoanal., 4:327–47.
SON AND FATHER 67
——
(1979). Fathering: a review of some psychoanalytic contributions on
paternity. Int. J. Psychoanal., 60:317– 27.
——(1982). Oedipus revisited: Laius and “the Laius complex.” Psychoanal.
Study Child, 37:169–200.
2
The female Oedipus complex and the
relationship to the body
M.EGLÉ LAUFER
Women’s lives and their own view of themselves have changed
dramatically over the past 50 years since Freud wrote his last paper on the
subject. Moreover, the opposition to Freud’s view, voiced by some
analysts at that time, has gained support both from analysts and women
themselves. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984) said, ‘the works of
Kestemberg, Galenson, Roiphe…have in my view invalidated and
discredited the claims of the theory of phallic monism to be regarded any
longer as the gospel truth. In fact, it is not simply a question of rejecting
this infantile sexual theory as purely defensive, but of drawing the
consequences of this rejection for psychoanalytic theory overall. If the
girl stands in the first place not for deficiency, but primordially for
receptacle, then our conceptions of psychosexual evolution must change
direction or even be reversed, the site of what is most instinctual and
animal to the human being must be rediscovered’ (p. 169). I think what
she is saying here expresses something that we have all been aware of for
a long time in our clinical work.
Like Chasseguet, I have, of course, also been impressed by the findings
of child and adult analysts who have shown convincingly that the little
girl’s awareness of her own body is not primarily that of lacking a penis.
She has a much earlier awareness of her body as containing an inside
space and of the openings in her body, the mouth, anus, and possibly the
vagina. I believe, however, that we must now understand how these
circumstances relate to the early history of the development of the girl’s
relationship to her own body and how it will shape and determine her
future development.
From my own clinical observations of disturbed adolescent girls and
women who had experienced a psychotic or depressive breakdown
following the birth of their first child, it seemed to me that the conflicts
underlying the path toward pathological development were in fact not so
different from those described by Freud and others and that it was
therefore more a matter of finding a different way of understanding the
68
THE FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY 69
concepts that Freud had made central to the understanding of pathology.
It was for this reason that I have chosen to examine the theme of the
castration complex in feminine development which Freud made central
to his theory of female development (1931). What I have tried to clarify
is that the significance of the early, infantile, masturbatory activity and
sensory experiences together with their accompanying fantasies, which
include the awareness of inner space and of body openings, lies in the
relationship that this establishes between the girl and her own body and
the extent to which this relationship then facilitates or hinders the child’s
ability to detach herself from her dependence on the mother. The
ongoing early Oedipal conflict can then be understood as inevitably
leading to a later point in development where the awareness of reality—
the separation from the mother and the impingement on the child’s
omnipotent fantasies of the unrivaled role of the father in relation to the mother
—has to be acknowledged by both the male and female child. With this
acknowledgment the child, boy or girl, also has to make an
accompanying change in the relation to his or her own body and its
contents. The outcome of this change, the resolution of the Oedipal
conflict, whether it takes on a defensive character, and to what extent
this defensive character will affect the child’s capacity for the perception
of reality will point the way to future pathology or normality (M.Laufer 1982).
Freud (1905) saw the role of sexuality in mental life as inextricably
linked with pathological development and symptom formation. He
postulated that there can be no disturbance in mental functioning
without an accompanying disturbance in the sexual life of the person. I
think we have taken a long time to understand that this is not simply a
statement about genital functioning as such—i.e., of orgastic or
reproductive capacity. It is a way of saying that in order to remain free of
pathology, as adults, we have to be able to experience our bodies as a
source of pleasure and instinctual gratification. But although we cannot
‘give up’ the pleasure principle as the source of infantile omnipotence,
we must find a way to accommodate external reality so that we can
maintain an area of our lives in which the pleasure principle can still
reign supreme.
Freud, it seems to me, was the first to recognize the girl’s biologically
determined, relative difficulty in achieving this—relative, that is, to the
boy. I believe that girls behave as if they ‘lacked something’, however
much they may have been told or been aware that they didn’t and that
they had other powers or capacities. Penis envy may appear outdated, in
our present social climate, but behaviorally the concept still has a validity
and the power to shape women’s lives. It is for this reason that I have
started out on the assumption that although the findings of Klein (1928),
Horney (1923) and Jones (1927) must be included in our thinking as well
70 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
as the change in women’s awareness of themselves, the problem is how
to include them rather than perpetuating a controversy as to who has the
‘complete truth’.
Similarly, I too have, of course, been aware that the little girl’s
attachment to her father does not begin when she turns away from her
relationship to her mother. Clearly, the child has an intense and
libidinized relationship to the father before the actual pressure to resolve
the Oedipal situation becomes imperative. I would see the
developmental task or problem more simply: how far can the girl
relinquish the libidinal tie to the mother without having to find some
symptomatic compromise solution through identification with the father
or a masochistic submission to the father. Clinically, in the transference,
it has seemed to me more a question of whether the relationship to the
father and later to men is allowed into the space the girl has been able to
create between herself and her internalized mother, or whether his
presence continues to act like an ineffectual shadow in her life that is felt
as a threat which comes between her and the internalized mother.
My own conclusions are still changing in the light of my clinical
experiences and those of others. These have come from work with
adolescent girls who are developmentally faced with the task of changing
their relationship to their body from that of the prepubertal child to that
of a sexual adult woman, or of pregnant young women where the task is
one of changing the relationship to themselves to that of identifying with
their own mother’s maternal role. In both these situations the
pathological, defensive symptomatology which may result demonstrates
the genetic history of the earlier development of the relationship to their
bodies. What has impressed me most has been the capacity of some
women to deny the reality of the changes taking place in their bodies or
their compelling need physically to attack their own bodies or later that
of their babies during these critical developmental periods.
In order to explain these pathological phenomena I think we have to
take seriously the events in our patients’ lives as biological realities and
not only as a metaphor that can have interchangeable meanings in
fantasy. This makes the issue of the timing and function of the resolution
of the Oedipal conflict a critical issue. If we regard the resolution of the
depressive position as the central issue and hence only see the resolution
of the infant’s relationship to the breast as central to the therapeutic task,
I think we risk entering into the patient’s own delusional system when
applying it to clinical work with the disturbed adolescent or the
psychotic areas of functioning in the adult patient. We then leave them
without having made conscious their relationship to their adult sexual
body and and their internal experience of it. For this reason the timing of
the resolution of the Oedipal conflict is still central to our controversy.
THE FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY 71
Yet it seems to me that it would be most helpful if we were to change
the emphasis of the argument of whether a so-called ‘pre-Oedipal period’
exists or whether the Oedipal situation is there from much earlier—that
is, about when the relationship to the parents begins to take on a
competitive and triangular meaning to the child—to when does this
ongoing conflict have to find some resolution. My own answer would be
that while the infant or the ‘pre-Oedipal’ child can avoid the task of
resolving the Oedipal conflict for a prolonged period by the creation of its
own fantasy and later by masturbatory activity which maintains the
infantile omnipotence, this effort has to succumb at some point to the
realization of the differences between the sexes. It is the defenses against
this awareness which we see as the ‘psychical rigidity’ Freud (1933:134)
spoke of in the pathological development of women.
The way I have understood the significance of the earlier phase is that
it is the period in which the relationship to the girl’s own body becomes
established. The decisive factor is the extent to which she is left with a
narcissistic libidinal cathexis of her body rather than vulnerable to her selfdestructive impulses, because the predominance of a narcissistic cathexis
will help her to negotiate possessing a female body and becoming a
mother who can enjoy her child’s body. Or, as Freud (1933) said,
But the phase of the affectionate pre-Oedipus attachment is the
decisive one for a woman’s future: during it preparations are made for
the acquisition of characteristics with which she will later fulfil her role
in the sexual function and perform her invaluable social tasks.
(p. 134)
The significance of the Oedipus complex in development, and
specifically the manner in which it is dissolved in the girl’s development
by the end of the Oedipal period, have been, and still are, the focus for
much theoretical disagreement. Central to the past and present
controversies has been the idea that Freud created a false view of female
development because he was influenced by the idea of the supremacy of
the phallus and that he subordinated women to this idea. In fact, it is as if
Freud has come to represent what we have learned to recognize—that in
society there is, and always has been, a deep unconscious need to idealize
the penis into a symbolic phallus and that this need is common to both
men and women. But I believe that the framework of the questions that
Freud laid down as requiring an answer about the differences he observed
in the development of males and females still does help us to understand
how such a fantasy can come into being and how it comes to exercise
such a dominating influence on the unconscious and on the capacity to
live with the reality of one’s body.
72 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
I will limit myself to three main themes in Freud’s formulations which
are central to these questions. First, Freud defined the girl’s perception of
her body as being ‘castrated’ and assumed that the manner in which she
dealt with this formed the basis of her castration complex and determined
her future sexual development. Second, I shall describe the nature of the
early attachment to the mother and ask whether it is different from that
of the boy from the beginning, or whether it only takes on a different
course at some later point in development, as suggested to Freud by the
observation that girls have a longer period of attachment to the mother
than boys; or, putting it another way, is there something different in this
early relationship that then makes it more difficult for the girl to detach
herself from the mother? Third, I repeat Freud’s very fundamental
question: what is it that enables the girl to give up the homosexual object
at all and to make a heterosexual object choice, i.e. to turn from the
mother to the father as a libidinal object? And must this result, as Helene
Deutsch (1930) suggests, in a masochistic libidinal surrender to the father,
through turning the acceptance of castration into the fantasy of the
castration wish?
Although I can no longer accept the description Freud (1925) gives of
the little girl’s reaction to the sight of the penis as constituting an actual
event that then signals a landmark in her development,1 I do believe that
something has to occur, optimally as part of a gradual process rather than
contained in a traumatic event, which functions as an organizer of all the
earlier experiences and perceptions and which will lay the foundation for
the way the girl will relate to herself as a woman in her adult life. That is,
however much I have come to understand the essential part played by
the early experiences in the capacity for normal development, as in the
capacity for object relationships and in the relationship to oneself and
one’s body, I think that the manner in which the existing psychic
organization of the little girl reacts to the inevitable demand to see herself
as belonging to the same sex as her mother (and one that differentiates
her from the father) crucially impinges on her previously established
narcissistic organization and leads her into a different developmental path
from that of the boy, whether it is toward normality or a more
pathological development. To view herself as ‘not having a body that
enables her to become a man’ which is how I understand the term
‘castrated’ irrespective of her awareness of her receptive capacities or of
having a vagina, means that at some point in her development she must
give up the fantasy of being able to keep her mother’s love to herself,
because it simultaneously implies an understanding that there exists a longedfor satisfaction which her mother can obtain from the father, and that it is
one which the girl can never hope to replace (Lampl-de Groot 1927).
THE FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY 73
Up to this time, the girl (like the boy) has been able through her
masturbatory fantasies and the accompanying sensory experiences to
invest her body and its products with the omnipotent power of being
both the potential giver of gratification to the mother, or of being able to
take over the role of ‘frustrator’ of the mother through the discovered
capacity to achieve her own gratification by using her own body. The
meaning of these early fantasies of using the body and its products, in the
infant’s attempts to maintain infantile omnipotence, and as a defense
against the primitive anxieties of being destroyed, was investigated by
Melanie Klein (1928) who has made an important contribution to our
understanding the intensity of the persecutory anxieties that help to
attach the girl to her mother. I also think that if the masturbatory
experiences help the girl to internalize a positive relationship to her
actual body, they will enable her to risk being less dependent on the
mother for her survival and gratification, and can then act as a basis on
which she is better able to accept her castration with less persecutory anxiety.
The libidinal relationship to the Either is initially contained in the
fantasy of the overlapping, interchangeable relationship in the images of
both mother and Either, where the parents (insofar as they can become
gradually separated in the child’s mind) are experienced as gratifying each other
—but initially only through the same means that are available to the
child, i.e. through mouth, anus, breast, feces, clitoris, or penis, where the
father can be both giver and receiver, as can the child and the mother. In
this respect, I cannot see that the girl’s awareness of an extra opening, the
vagina, adds to the awareness of a difference in her potential role of
giving or receiving. Paula Heimann (1952) summarizes this early stage of
development of the Oedipus complex as ‘the infant…divines that there
are physical intimacies between his parents—and in so far recognizes a
reality; but he conceives of these intimacies in terms of his own impulses,
in other words, his notions are determined by projection and by so much
are a gross distortion of reality. The parents do to one another what he
himself would like to do’ (p. 163). Even if we conceptualize the infant as
perceiving the mother as containing the father’s penis in the early oral
relationship (as described by Melanie Klein, 1928), this does not add
anything of special significance to the girl’s early development of the
awareness of herself as female and different from the male, since its
significance is the same for both the boy and the girl—that of seeing the
mother as the primary object who frustrates the desire for gratification
and thus is responsible for the narcissistic injury this inflicts on the infant.
Freud (1931) made it clear that he too was aware of how these early
frustrations at the breast constitute a narcissistic injury to the infant’s sense
of omnipotence, but he still laid stress on the difference between these
early and gradual developments of the infant’s sense of reality of his own
74 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
helplessness and the specific nature of the later injury that the lack of a
penis evokes in the girl. Melanie Klein’s work provides us with details of
the destructive fantasies against the mother who not only contains the
penis but the babies inside her body which both the boy and the girl feel
deprived of in their wish to identify themselves with the mother. But it is
the anxiety aroused by the destructive fantasies related to this blow to her
omnipotence which the girl, as different from the boy, feels unable to
allay through finding a means in the use of her body. Possessing at least
the potential of a potent penis, the boy can use it as a defense against the
anxiety of his projected fantasies of a devouring, unsatisfied and envious
mother. It is here that Melanie Klein has contributed, for me, to
answering Freud’s question not only why there is so much aggression
exhibited by the girl to the mother, or why she appears to blame the
mother for all the deprivation (including the lack of a penis), but to the
understanding of how her relative inability to detach herself from the
mother, relative (that is) to that of the boy, derives from the anxiety
coming from the projection onto her mother of the fantasy of her own
dissatisfaction and disappointment. Detaching herself can then only be
felt as depriving her mother of her satisfaction.
But I think this view of the girl as needing a penis in order both to feel
she can satisfy the mother and to maintain her belief that the mother can
still satisfy her own wish for a baby confirms Freud’s view that penis
envy, the wish for the penis, in the girl is an expression of the wish to live
out her primary libidinal aim—of giving or being given a baby by the
mother, while the fantasy of actually possessing a penis is a secondary
pathological structure whose aim is defensive and related to persecutory
anxiety (Jones 1927).
Freud (1931) talked of the girl’s ‘acceptance of castration’ as being
simultaneous with the time at which the libidinal tie to the mother is
given up. Reviewing his description of the options that are then open to
the girl, I have found it helpful to make use of my clinical experience of
the transference relationship in the analysis of adolescent girls and young
adult women. This seems to indicate quite clearly that the libidinal tie to
the mother has very often not been given up at all. Sublimatory as well as
sexual activities in women are still extremely vulnerable to inhibition and
other defenses because of the intense anxiety aroused either by the
mother’s envy or by the identification with the forbidden possession of
the father’s penis. Freud also points to this problem in his comment on
the high incidence of frigidity in women, which he sees as an inhibition
of sexuality. He said (1931), ‘Indeed, we had to reckon with the
possibility that a number of women remain arrested in their original
attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over
towards men’ (p. 226).
THE FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY 75
Further clinical evidence for this view comes from the high incidence
of postnatal depression in women after the birth of their first child. This
can be understood as the final process of mourning for the loss of the tie
to their mother that becoming a mother involves. In addition, it can also
be understood as representing an identification with the fantasy of a
dissatisfied and depressed mother who has to be kept appeased by the
daughter’s giving up or inhibiting her own potential satisfaction and
enjoyment of having produced her own child. For some women this
conflict can become so intense that the reality of the baby has to be
disavowed altogether, the relationship to the baby cannot become
established, and instead the woman will experience an acute psychotic
state with all the subsequent danger of violence either against herself or
the baby.
In severely disturbed adolescent girls, what can be observed clinically is
how the effort to defend against the still existing libidinal attachment to
the mother—which has now the added danger of becoming an
incestuous homosexual tie to the mother—can lead to the compelling
need to direct aggression against their own body in an attempt to detach
themselves from their sexual body and its meaning, as in suicide attempts, selfcutting, anorexia, bulimia, and so on.
Freud describes the outcome of the castration complex as resulting in
either an eventual ‘acceptance of castration’ or a setting up of the
masculinity complex as an attempt to maintain the ‘disavowal’ of
castration. He makes the point that both the boy’s and the girl’s first
reaction to the task of allowing the perception of the ‘absence of a penis’
into their awareness—that is, their first recognition of the difference
between male and female—is one of disavowal. But once the girl has
accepted herself as being without a penis, i.e., castrated, the most
significant difference between the boy and the girl is that in the girl it
leads to a repression of her sexuality. He makes it clear that he is here
referring specifically to a phallic sexuality—that is, the relation of the girl
to her own genitals both as a source of pleasurable experience and as
containing her active aims to give her mother satisfaction or a baby—and
these have to be repressed because ‘they have proved totally
unrealizable’. He continues, however, to say that
the passive [i.e., the receptive] trends have not escaped disappointment
either. With the turning-away from the mother clitoral masturbation
frequently ceases as well; and often enough when the small girl
represses her previous masculinity a considerable portion of her sexual
trends in general is permanently injured too. The transition to the fatherobject is accomplished with the help of the passive trends in so far as
they have escaped the catastrophe. The path to the development of
76 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
femininity now lies open to the girl, to the extent to which it is not
restricted by the remains of the pre-Oedipus attachment to her mother
which she has surmounted.
(p. 239)
Later he makes it clear that if the girl is to develop normally, she must
take the father as a sexual object in the final stage of her Oedipus
complex and before its final resolution. I think this view has aroused
some of the most intense criticism of the psychoanalytic theory of female
sexuality since it lends itself to the equating of the ‘passive aims’ with the
idea of ‘masochism’ as if masochism were an essential part of normal
female sexuality.
From my clinical observations of adult women who showed a marked
masochistic trend in their sexual relations, I would be more inclined to
say that if the girl has been able to give up the libidinal attachment to the
mother, resulting from the acceptance of herself as castrated, and with it
her hatred of the mother, then the passive aims which she uses to
maintain a relationship to the father have more of a narcissistic wish
attached than the directly sexual wish of castration or penetration. The
satisfaction that the girl seeks, I think, is that of still feeling her body
valued and desired, even though it now appears to contain only her
pregenital passive wishes. But once a libidinal aim is included in the
passive, wishful fantasy directed at the father, it must take on a
masochistic meaning since the ‘acceptance of castration’ has now taken
on a wishful quality and has become a ‘castration wish’. And the
‘castration wish’ then forms the basis for a masochistic fantasy of being
castrated by the father through penetration. This occurs only where there
is a displacement of the aggression related to the still unbroken tie to the
mother and not as a result of detachment from the mother. It represents a
compromise in order to keep repressed the existence of the libidinal tie
to the mother through the possession of the fantasy penis which the
father must take from her, while the hatred of the mother becomes
internalized into the superego structure.
Normal latency fantasies for the girl are of being chosen instead of
having to choose, of being desired instead of experiencing sexual desire
herself. These wishful fantasies, and the wish for a baby, can allow the
passive pregenital longings to continue to find expression, without the
anxiety of regressive longings for the mother. But I do not see this
suppression of sexuality during latency as necessarily leading, as Freud
(1931) suggests, to the extinction of the girl’s sexuality in her adult life.
Rather it seems to me to be an expression of the fantasy depicted in ‘The
Sleeping Beauty’ that everybody has to remain asleep, the girl princess as
well as her parents the king and queen, until she is discovered and her
THE FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY 77
resistance surmounted by the prince. This fable is not so much a story of
passive masochistic surrender to the man, but of the need to control both
the parents and her sexuality and her own ‘prickly’ hatred, during
latency, in order later to allow the prince to gain entry to the palace and
to discover the girl’s hidden vagina.
The other alternative is the formation of a masculinity complex.
Although Freud comments that if it persists into adulthood, it can lead to
a homosexual object choice, it is often confused with penis envy. From a
diagnostic point of view a careful distinction must be made between the
two. Penis envy and competitive behaviour with men express the wish
for a penis, while the masculinity complex contains the fantasy of
possessing a penis. The distinction marks the difference between
normality or neurotic development, even distorted by envy and the need
to compete with men, and more severe pathology, which may contain a
psychotic area at its core. The continued disavowal of castration into
adulthood through the construction of a fantasy of a body that includes a
penis must distort the relationship with reality to a degree that leaves the
woman with the potential for a psychotic breakdown when faced by
reality with a challenge to that fantasy, as Freud (1931) points out when
he talks of the normal first disavowal by the girl.
A young woman who had retained a fantasy of possessing a penis into
young adulthood, for instance, felt consciously free of all anxiety in a
satisfactory homosexual relationship, but then felt compelled to break off
the relationship when it began to force her to acknowledge that she
could neither give nor receive a baby. The initial lack of anxiety about
her homosexuality resulted from her ability to gratify the wish to
continue to deny castration. The wish for a baby, however, brought with
it the anxiety of experiencing a break with the reality of her body in
order to maintain the disavowal of castration, and with it the danger of
severely damaging attacks on her own body as an expression of her
hatred and disappointment in its failure.
I have observed similar transitory paranoid states in adult women who
feel dependent on the need to masturbate, where the paranoid reaction
becomes comprehensible only when it becomes clear how it relates
unconsciously to masturbatory activity and fantasies. I think such
evidence in the transference of psychotic anxiety in connection with
masturbatory activity must always relate to the fantasy that the body
includes a penis and differs from more neurotic anxiety seen in the
transference as the fear of the analyst’s disgust or contempt. However, it
could also be argued that the fantasy of possessing a penis can be used as a
defense, without necessarily posing a danger of an underlying psychosis,
until the first experience of penetration of the vagina. It is only then that
the masculinity complex must finally be given up, if the construction of a
78 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
psychotic body image is to be avoided and the subsequent pull toward a
homosexual object choice. The importance of the first act of penetration
is referred to by Freud (1918) when he examines the custom in some
primitive societies of allowing the first act of penetration to be carried
out by a person other than the prospective husband. He attributes this to
a fear of the hostility that is aroused in a woman and becomes directed at
the man who carries out the act. He makes it clear that the aggression is
related to a fantasy that the act of penetration is a renewed confirmation
of lacking a penis.
In discussing female development in terms of the significance of the
castration complex, and the special nature of the girl’s relationship to her
mother, I have said little about the girl’s relationship to the father beyond
my discomfort at, or perhaps disbelief in, the concept of the girl turning
to her father when she has succeeded in detaching herself from the
mother, before the final resolution of the Oedipus complex. I think, as
do many analysts, that there is a much earlier libidinal attachment to the
father. The idea of the ‘Oedipus complex’ being made up of a constant
move between the negative and the positive complex, beginning from
the time when the child—boy or girl—first begins to differentiate
between himself or herself and the nurturing object, seems more correct
nowadays than to assume that there is a sudden shift to the father.
However, the basic dependence on the mother as the nurturing object
exerts a constant force on the girl, as well as on the boy, to relinquish the
libidinal attachment to the father and to put an identification with him in
its place—an identification which then allows the child to continue to
feel in exclusive possession of the mother. The girl therefore certainly
forms much earlier libidinal attachments to her father, but she also has to
relinquish them because of her greater anxiety. The final dissolution of
the Oedipus complex marks the resolution of the conflict between the
positive and negative Oedipal situation by the giving up of both
attachments and maintaining only an ‘affectionate tie’ as Freud (1924)
described it for the boy. This then allows the girl to move into latency
and to use her identifications with both parents as the basis of her
sublimatory activity.
The third possible outcome of the castration complex proposed by
Freud consists in a general revulsion from sexuality by the girl. It is to be
distinguished from that of the girl who, although also giving up
masturbation, still remains sufficiently in touch with her passive wishes
with which to turn to the father. The crucial issue for future
development would therefore be whether in thus rejecting her own
sexuality, the relationship to the father also has to be renounced. A father
who is overtly sexual toward his daughter may have to become an ‘object
of revulsion’ for the girl because of her need to keep her own sexual
THE FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY 79
feelings repressed. In the normal adolescent girl such an attitude may be
revived as her initial reaction to the awareness of the penis in its sexual
role, but she can gradually come to relate to the male’s penis as she is able
to relate more positively toward her own genitals. If the revulsion toward
her own sexual body remains too intense, however, the problem of
relating to a man’s penis can remain unresolved. This may again lay the
adolescent girl open either to regressing to the pregenital relationship to
the mother or to seeking a homosexual relationship. Although I agree
that in the course of normal development a relationship to the father has
to become established after the dissolution of the negative Oedipal
complex, I do not believe that the wish for a baby with which the girl
turns to the father has to imply an instinctual wish for gratification. If it
does, as I said earlier, I believe it must contain a masochistic fantasy, the
aim of which is to deflect and keep repressed the intense violent and
sadistic impulses that still tie the girl to the mother.
I now turn to some clinical material of an 18-year-old adolescent girl
who began analysis after a severe suicide attempt. Because the
relationship to the father had never been established in the early preOedipal period in a way that could then lead to a normal Oedipal
conflict, the girl remained attached to the mother and had no means of
feeling that she could relate to her female sexual body other than as an
identification with that of her mother’s. This in turn compelled her to
attempt to destroy it because of the conflict aroused by her effort to feel
that she could be in control of her own body. The castration complex
had been resolved by the disavowal of castration and men were seen by
her as violent intruders into the fantasy of union of herself with the mother
—that is, as a projection which contained her own hatred of the mother.
In a preliminary interview Mary described herself as having ‘been
dead’ since the age of 16. It had therefore not been any particular event
which finally led to her attempt to kill herself. She said she hated her
body and related it to her disgust with her mother’s body because her
mother suffered from a colonic disorder and she did not want to have to
think about her mother’s body. She had in fact ceased to have any
interest in her own body and its appearance at the age of 16 at the time
of her mother’s illness. This followed shortly after she had been away
from home for the first time, staying with another family. An elderly
male relative of that family had kissed her in a sexual way and had
frightened and disgusted her. At that time she also gave up seeing a
boyfriend with whom she had gone out once, on the grounds that her
mother didn’t approve of him. From that time onward she retreated into
her studies and only went out when accompanied by her mother or her
female friends. Her suicide attempt was preceded by a period during
which she secretly and compulsively stuffed herself with food; as a result,
80 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
she then felt disgusted with her own body. It was as if what she had
experienced at 16 was the failure of her capacity to allow a man to relate
to her body sexually because she had been unable to integrate her own
sexual development in any way other than as something disgusting and
repelling.
When she was seen at 18 for assessment, she was dressed in a little
girl’s dress covered over by a coat which she kept on in order to keep her
body completely hidden. She knew that her problems were related to her
mother; she felt that she either had to allow herself to be completely
dominated and ‘eaten up’ by her mother or that by removing herself and
becoming independent she would cause her mother to collapse and ‘to
starve’. She saw her attempt to kill herself as the only independent action
that she had been able to do and that she had felt forced into by her
terror and despair at her own helplessness. She used her relationship to
her father to feed herself with the fantasy that he preferred her to her
mother and that her mother wanted to be rid of her in order to have the
father to herself. At these times she felt afraid that her mother was trying
to poison her.
In the transference she experienced the analyst both as an intruder into
her fantasy in which she was together and united with her mother and
her body, while at the same time trying to keep repressed her wish to
give in to the analyst and be dominated by her with the fantasy that this
would destroy the mother. Her body was used to live out this fantasy in
alternately repelling the analyst by silence and secretiveness and later in
falling asleep throughout the sessions.
Her first ‘attempt’ at sexual intercourse was initiated by her inviting a
man to stay the night in her apartment and then furiously fighting with
him when he tried to approach her sexually. The following day she
reported triumphantly that she had proved that she could be strong
enough to prevent a man from raping her. In this way she succeeded in
living out her fantasy that I, the analyst, would love her and that we
could remain united as long as she could prevent the act of penetration
which would compel us both to acknowledge a man’s penis and our own
helplessness as castrated women and therefore our hatred of each other.
As long as she could feel strong enough to keep the man’s penis
outside and from intruding into her own and my reality, we could
remain in her fantasy as totally dependent on each other for our needs.
Men, she felt, were there only for us to be seen together with so that we
appeared normal like other women. Her fear of even that wish was of
being seen with a man who might then be the admired one and she
would be left out feeling jealous. In this way she expressed her wish to
deny the existence of the penis completely, even as something that she
THE FEMALE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY 81
could own and use in relation to other women. Only in this way could
she feel in control of her own hatred and jealous feelings.
Her sexual life was dominated by the fantasy of being given an enema,
as she had once experienced when 4 years old from her mother. This
fantasy provided the motivation for making her feel that if she could not
control her bodily needs (as in eating), she would have to reject her body
altogether, as in killing herself, because of her disgust with it. The
predominance of the anus in her mental life could deny both her own
vagina and the penis and therefore the sexual difference between male
and female. In this way she could continue to see herself as able to satisfy
her mother’s needs and feel in control of her own needs.
For this girl, the absence of a libidinal relationship to the father meant
that even a shift away from the mother by displacement onto the father
of the masochistic wish to be castrated was not open to her. When she
began analysis, she lived with a constant belief that her parents were
about to separate. Mary had already experienced herself as an object of
disgust during latency, as was shown in the repeated nightmares she
reported having had of being covered by crawling insects or skin diseases
making her feel ‘like a leper, untouchable’.
The actual experiences of her infancy could not be established, and
thus we did not know how far this relationship to her body was
defensive against the terror of an excessive intrusion in infancy or how
far it was based on her belief that she had had insufficient bodily care.
Probably both were true since her mother presented herself to me as
someone who needed to be told how to look after her daughter while at
the same time showing me that she would adhere to any instructions I
might give in a frightened and rigid way, as if I was a baby book
recommending four-hourly feedings. She described her daughter as
having been terrified of strangers at 8 months and clinging to her mother
and rejecting everyone else. This seemed to be repeated within the
transference where I was initially treated as a dangerous stranger who
could not be identified as a caring object but only as one who came
between her and her mother.
This case seems to me to illustrate how the relationship which the girl
forms to her own body in the early pre-Oedipal years determines how
the Oedipus complex is finally resolved: in turn, this then shapes the girl’s
subsequent ability to form a relationship to her own sexual body after puberty.
Note
1 In ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931) Freud himself modifies this view.
82 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Bibliography
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1984). The femininity of the analyst in professional
practice. Int. J. Psychoanal., 65:169–78.
Deutsch, H. (1930). The significance of masochism in the mental life of
women. Int. J. Psychoanal., 11:48–60.
Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality: S.E., 7:125–243.
——(1918). The taboo of virginity. S.E., 11:191–208.
——(1924). The dissolution of the oedipus complex. S.E., 19:173–179.
——(1925). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction
between the sexes. S.E., 19:248–58.
——(1931). Female sexuality. S.E., 21:223–43.
——(1933). Femininity. S.E., 22:112–35.
Heimann, P. (1952). Certain functions of introjection and projection in
early infancy. In Developments in Psycho-Analysis, pp. 122–68. London:
Hogarth Press.
Horney, K. (1923). On the genesis of the castration complex in women. Int.
J. Psychoanal., 5:50–65.
Jones, E. (1927). The early development of female sexuality. In Papers on PsychoAnalysis, pp. 438–51. London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox.
Klein, M. (1928). Early stages of the oedipus conflict. Int. J. Psychoanal, 9: 169–
180.
Lampl-de Groot, J. (1927). The evolution of the oedipus complex in
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Laufer, M. (1982). The formation and shaping of the oedipus complex. Int.
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Laufer, M. & Laufer, M.E. (1984). Adolesence and Developmental Breakdown.
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3
The missing link: parental sexuality in the
Oedipus complex
RONALD BRITTON
For Freud the Oedipus complex was the nuclear complex from its
discovery in 1897 to the end of his life (Freud 1897, 1924d). It remained
central in the development of the individual for Melanie Klein. She
adopted the term ‘Oedipal situation’ and included in it what Freud had
referred to as the primal scene, i.e. the sexual relations of the parents both
as perceived and as imagined (Klein 1928).
From the outset of her work with children Melanie Klein was
impressed at the ubiquity of the Oedipal situation and its unique
importance; she also thought that it began much earlier than did Freud
and that it began in relation to part objects before evolving into the
familiar Oedipus complex, which related to the two parents perceived as
whole objects—that is, as persons. So for her it began in infancy with
phantasies of a relation to breast and penis and phantasies of the
relationship between these two part objects, which would be succeeded
by ideas about the parents under the influence of these earlier phantasies.
She felt that the child’s attitude and relationship to this unfolding
situation was of profound significance for the urge to learn, which she
called the epistemophilic impulse, and for the individual’s relationship to
reality.
In 1926 she wrote,
at a very early age children become acquainted with reality through
the deprivations it imposes on them. They defend themselves against
reality by repudiating it. The fundamental thing, however, and the
criterion of all later capacity for adaptation to reality is the degree in
which they are able to tolerate the deprivations that result from the
Oedipal situation.
(Klein 1926)
This was written more than a decade Before Mrs Klein was to describe
what she called the ‘depressive position’—that period of integration and
recognition which entailed a realization of the nature of the world
83
84 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
outside the self and of the nature of the internal ambivalent feelings
towards it, in other words, the beginnings of a sense of external and
internal reality and the relationship between them. Since the delineation
of this central concept of Kleinian thinking, it has become increasingly
evident that the capacity to comprehend and relate to reality is
contingent on working through the depressive position. Klein repeatedly
emphasized that the Oedipus complex develops hand-in-hand with the
developments that make up the depressive position, and I have suggested
elsewhere that the working-through of one entails the working through
of the other (Britton 1985).
This initial recognition of the parental sexual relationship involves
relinquishing the idea of sole and permanent possession of mother and
leads to a profound sense of loss which, if not tolerated, may become a
sense of persecution. Later, the Oedipal encounter also involves
recognition of the difference between the relationship between parents as
distinct from the relationship between parent and child: the parents’
relationship is genital and procreative; the parent-child relationship is not.
This recognition produces a sense of loss and envy, which, if not
tolerated, may become a sense of grievance or self-denigration.
The Oedipus situation dawns with the child’s recognition of the
parents’ relationship in whatever primitive or partial form. It is continued
by the child’s rivalry with one parent for the other, and it is resolved by
the child relinquishing his sexual claim on his parents by his acceptance
of the reality of their sexual relationship.
In this chapter I want to suggest that if the encounter with the parental
relationship starts to take place at a time when the individual has not
established a securely based maternal object, the Oedipus situation
appears in analysis only in primitive form and is not immediately
recognizable as the classical Oedipus complex. In the first part of the
chapter I describe a patient who illustrates this situation.
In less severe disorders it is the final relinquishment of the Oedipal
objects that is evaded. An illusional Oedipal configuration is formed as a
defensive organization in order to deny the psychic reality of the parental
relationship. I emphasize that it is a defence against psychic reality
because these defensive phantasies are organized to prevent the
emergence of facts already known and phantasies already existent. The
parental relationship has been registered but is now denied and defended
against by what I call an Oedipal illusion. These illusional systems
provide what Freud called a
THE MISSING LINK 85
domain…separated from the real external world at the time of the
introduction of the reality principle…free from the demand of the
exigencies of life, like a kind of reservation.
(Freud 1924e)
In the same passage, he describes the person who creates such a domain
in his mind as
lending a special importance and secret meaning to a piece of reality
which is different from the reality which is defended against.
(ibid)
In the second part of this chapter I discuss patients who exemplify such
Oedipal illusions.
In contrast to the fixity of these Oedipal illusions, the Oedipal rivalry
both in the positive (heterosexual) form and in the negative
(homosexual) form provides a means of working through the depressive
position. In each version one parent is the object of desire, and the other
is the hated rival. This configuration is retained, but the feeling changes
in relation to each parent. Thus good becomes bad and vice versa as
positive changes to negative. My contention is that the evasive use of this
switch is halted by the full recognition of the parents’ sexual relationship,
their different anatomy, and the child’s own nature. This involves the
realization that the same parent who is the object of Oedipal desire in
one version is the hated rival in the other.
The acknowledgement by the child of the parents’ relationship with
each other unites his psychic world, limiting it to one world shared with
his two parents in which different object relationships can exist. The
closure of the Oedipal triangle by the recognition of the link joining the
parents provides a limiting boundary for the internal world. It creates
what I call a ‘triangular space’—i.e., a space bounded by the three
persons of the Oedipal situation and all their potential relationships. It
includes, therefore, the possibility of being a participant in a relationship
and observed by a third person as well as being an observer of a
relationship between two people.
To clarify this point it is helpful to remember that observed and
imagined events take place in a world conceived of as continuous in
space and time (Rey 1979) and given structure by the Oedipal
configuration. The capacity to envisage a benign parental relationship
influences the development of a space outside the self capable of being
observed and thought about, which provides the basis for a belief in a
secure and stable world.
86 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
The primal family triangle provides the child with two links
connecting him separately with each parent and confronts him with the
link between them which excludes him. Initially this parental link is
conceived in primitive part-object terms and in the modes of his own
oral, anal and genital desires, and in terms of his hatred expressed in oral,
anal and genital terms. If the link between the parents perceived in love
and hate can be tolerated in the child’s mind, it provides him with a
prototype for an object relationship of a third kind in which he is a
witness and not a participant. A third position then comes into existence
from which object relationships can be observed. Given this, we can also
envisage being observed. This provides us with a capacity for seeing
ourselves in interaction with others and for entertaining another point of
view whilst retaining our own, for reflecting on ourselves whilst being
ourselves. This is a capacity we hope to find in ourselves and in our
patients in analysis. Anyone, however, who has treated a psychotic
patient or been involved in a psychotic transference will know what I
mean when I refer to times when this seems impossible, and it is at those
times that one realizes what it means to lack that third position.
A patient who exemplifies difficulties in the first
encounters with the Oedipal situation
In my early work with this patient, Miss A, I was hardly aware that my
difficulties in understanding her had anything to do with the Oedipus
complex. What gradually became evident was that she lacked the ‘third
position’ described above. She could not conceive of relationships
between others, and it was intolerable for her to feel that I was
communing with myself about her.
Miss A came into treatment after a psychotic breakdown in midlife.
She was relatively soon afterwards able to carry on an ostensibly normal
life in the outside world, but she remained for many years in a psychotic
state of mind in her sessions and in relation to me.
I came to learn that she could not allow the notion of parental
intercourse to exist because she could only anticipate it as a disaster. The
possibility of my communicating with a third object was unthinkable for
her, and so the third position I refer to was untenable.
As a consequence it seemed impossible to disentangle myself
sufficiently from the to-and-fro of the interaction to know what was
going on. In the early years of her analysis I found that any move of mine
towards that which by another person would have been called objectivity
could not be tolerated. We were to move along a single line and meet at
a single point. There was to be no lateral movement. A sense of space
could be achieved only by increasing the distance between us, a process
THE MISSING LINK 87
she found hard to bear unless she initiated it. What I felt I needed
desperately was a place in my mind that I could step into sideways from
which I could look at things. If I tried to force myself into such a
position by asserting a description of her in analytic terms, she would
become violent, sometimes physically, sometimes by screaming. When it
became a little more contained, she could express it in words: she
shouted: ‘Stop that fucking thinking!’ I came to realize that these efforts
of mine to consult my analytic self were detected by her and experienced
as a form of internal intercourse of mine, which corresponded to parental
intercourse. This she felt threatened her existence. If I turned to
something in my mind later on, when things were not so primitive, she
felt I was eliminating my experience of her in my mind. The only way I
found of finding a place to think that was helpful and not disruptive was
to allow the evolution within myself of my own experience and to
articulate this to myself, whilst communicating to her my understanding of her
point of view. This, I found, did enlarge the possibilities and my patient
could begin to think. It seemed to me that it was a model in which
parental intercourse could take place if the knowledge of it did not force
itself in some intrusive way into the child’s mind. Should it do so, it
appeared to be felt to be annihilating the child’s link with her mother
both externally and internally.
In an attempt to understand this clinical situation, I have called on
Bion’s concept of the ‘container and contained’, in addition to Melanie
Klein’s theories of the early Oedipus situation. Bion (1959) has described
the consequences for some individuals of a failure of maternal
containment as the development within them of a destructive envious
superego that prevents them from learning or pursuing profitable
relations with any object. He makes it clear that the inability of the
mother to take in her child’s projections is experienced by the child as a
destructive attack by her on his link and communication with her as his
good object.
The idea of a good maternal object can only be regained by splitting
off her impermeability so that now a hostile force is felt to exist, which
attacks his good link with his mother. Mother’s goodness is now
precarious and depends on him restricting his knowledge of her.
Enlargement of knowledge of her as a consequence of development and
his curiosity are felt to menace this crucial relationship. Curiosity also
discloses the existence of the Oedipal situation. This in the development
of every child is a challenge to his belief in the goodness of his mother,
and a reluctance to admit it into his picture of his mother is normal. In
the child already menaced by any enlargement of his knowledge of his
mother because of her existing precarious status in his mind, the further
threat of acknowledging her relationship with father is felt to spell
88 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
disaster. The rage and hostility that would be aroused by this discovery is
felt to threaten his belief in a world where good objects can exist. The
hostile force that was thought to attack his original link with his mother
is now equated with the Oedipal father, and the link between the parents
is felt to reconstitute her as the non-receptive deadly mother. The child’s
original link with the good maternal object is felt to be the source of life,
and so, when it is threatened, life is felt to be threatened.
In some personalities, therefore, the full recognition of parental
sexuality is felt as a danger to life. The emergence in the transference of
the full emotional significance for them of an idea of the primal scene is
followed by panic attacks and fear of imminent death. Greater knowledge
of the Oedipal situation is also felt to initiate a mental catastrophe.
Faced with this—as Klein (1946) and Bion (1956) have pointed out—
the psychotic mutilates his mind in order not to perceive it. In
schizophrenic patients the mental apparatus is splintered, and thinking
becomes impossible. The patient I am describing, Miss A, appeared to
have preserved a great deal by a violent severance of her mind so that
some parts were protected from knowledge and only emerged in a
psychotic breakdown or in analysis.
There was in her an ‘infantile’ self that appeared ignorant of anything
other than an ideal breast and a state of persecution. The persecutor was a
hovering male presence, which she feared might oust the good mother,
and she was terrified she might be left alone with this figure.
Interruptions in analysis and any interruptions in the flow of good
experience were felt to be the result of violent attacks from this hostile
object. At times I was taken to be this hostile object; at other times I was
felt to be the victim of it. I was also familiar with it in the form of my
patient attacking me. As progress was made and communications
between us became more possible, her internal situation became clearer.
She contained a hostile object, or part of herself in fusion with a hostile
object, that interfered in her attempts to communicate with me. At times
this had the power to control her speech, and she could not articulate. At
others she whispered words, and broken phrases were managed. If I
could demonstrate that I really wished to know her, which I could only
do by demonstrating some minimal understanding, her capacity to
communicate would be recovered. The way I came to understand that oftenrepeated sequence was that she needed some experience of my taking her
in before I could return in her mind as the good maternal object she could
talk to. Otherwise I might be what she called the ‘wrong person’.
The ‘wrong person’ looked like the right person but had connections
with father. For many years she was threatened by the fear of these
crucially distinguished figures becoming confused. The thought of her
idealized mother becoming united with father was her greatest fear. In
THE MISSING LINK 89
the transference it took the form of a fear that the different aspects of my
relationship with her would not be distinct from each other. Some of my
functions were regarded as good; others as bad, such as my going away.
She kept them distinct in her mind as if they were different transference
figures. ‘Don’t become one thing,’ she would say at times, in terror.
From this patient I learnt how essential it was to distinguish between the
integration that is sought for as a means of working through the
depressive position, and a fusion of elements that are not stabilized and
distinguished in their qualities and attributes, and whose union produces
a sense of chaos.
If any pressure towards precocious integration was felt to come from
me, it provoked great anxiety and either violent refusal or abject
masochistic submission. This latter reaction turned out to be based on a
phantasy of submission to a sadistic father and was regarded by my patient
as profoundly wicked but always tempting. It appeared to serve the
purpose of substituting herself for mother, such substitution provided
both perverse gratification and an avoidance of the phantasy of the
parents uniting.
She felt I must not become ‘one thing’—i.e., a monstrous
amalgamation of the separate maternal and paternal identities she had
attributed to me. The amalgam that would result from this union was an
ostensibly loving maternal figure who had inside her a contradiction of
her own nature; a presence that made all her apparent good qualities
treacherous. I was always reminded of descriptions of demonic
possession, in which the devil was felt to have infused all the
characteristics of the person with hidden evil. The horror she felt about
this figure was to do with its contradictory nature. She called it
‘unnatural’ and regarded the emergence of this idea of me in the
transference as disastrous because it destroyed not only all good but also
all meaning previously established.
This fearful outcome corresponds to Melanie Klein’s description of the
child’s terror of the combined object as a persecutory phantasy of the
parents fused in permanent intercourse. I would describe my patient as
having an infantile phantasy that her father was of such a nature and
power that he could penetrate her mother’s identity in such a way as to
corrupt her goodness, and maternal goodness, although precariously
idealized, was my patient’s only concept of goodness. It always impressed
me that for such a patient the very concept of goodness was at stake and
not simply its availability or presence.
It is not my intention here to go into the factors in the patient’s
disposition and life circumstances that contributed to this inability to
surmount the earliest stages of the Oedipus situation in any detail. I
would simply like to say that in my view it was the initial failure of
90 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
maternal containment that made the negotiation of the Oedipus complex
impossible. The personality and intrusiveness of her father into her
mother’s mind were very significant, but these were combined with the
patient’s own considerable difficulty in tolerating frustration. The
phantasy of parental intercourse was constructed from a combination of
projections of herself and perceptions of her parents.
My wish is to draw attention to the reality of her belief that
catastrophe was associated with the emergence of the Oedipal situation
and that consequently she resorted to violent splitting to prevent it
occurring. The result was an internal division within her mind organized
around separate parental objects whose conjunction she believed must be
prevented.
External reality may provide an opportunity for benign modification
of such phantasies, or may lend substance to fears. It may also provide
material for the formation of psychic structures that are meant to prevent
the recognition of the Oedipus situation. The situation in the family of
my patient enabled her to construct an internal organization of herself
and her objects which had three main parts with no integration of them.
Her everyday relationship with the outside world, which was
superficial, undemanding and reasonable, was based on her relationship
with her sibling. Internally she had one self in loving union with an
idealized mother and another self in alliance with a father seen as
epitomizing anti-mother love. The link between these two selves was
missing, as was the link between the internal parents.
What these two ‘selves’ did have in common, when it eventually
emerged, was hatred of the parents as a loving couple. Initially the two
parents could only be perceived as being linked in hate and mutual
incompatibility, which meant that their coming together was a disaster.
The gradual reclaiming by the patient of projected parts of herself in the
course of a long and very difficult treatment led to the emergence of the
idea of a couple who could unite willingly and pleasurably. New
difficulties then arose with the eruption of envy and jealousy; these
emotions were felt to be unbearable and seemed to become almost pure
psychic pain.
I would like to distinguish the problems of this patient from the others
referred to in this chapter whose difficulties with the Oedipus situation
were not so early, total or primitive. The difference clinically could be
summarized by saying that in this patient they were in the manner and
mode of the paranoid-schizoid position. I think aetiologicaly the
difference lay in the failure to establish a securely based, good maternal
object before encountering the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex.
THE MISSING LINK 91
Oedipal illusions
As described briefly above, Oedipal illusions are a developmentally later
phenomenon than the primitive wiping out of the parental relationship
with delusional developments that I have described in the previous
section. When these illusions are paramount, the parental relationship is
known but its full significance is evaded and its nature, which
demonstrates the differences between the parental relationship and the
parent-child relationship, is not acknowledged.
The illusion is felt to protect the individual from the psychic reality of
their phantasies of the Oedipal situation. These I have found, in such
cases, to be expectations of an endlessly humiliating exposure to parental
triumphalism or a disastrous version of parental intercourse. This latter is
perceived either as horrific, sado-masochistic or murderous intercourse,
or as depressive images of a ruined couple in a ruined world. However,
whilst such illusions are perpetuated as evasions of the underlying
situation, the Oedipus complex cannot be resolved through the normal
processes of rivalry and relinquishment.
I think that in normal development such illusions are frequent and
transitory, producing cycles of illusionment and disillusionment that are
the familar features of an analysis. In some people, however, the
persistence of an organized Oedipal illusion prevents the resolution of the
complex and in analysis the full development of its transference counterpart.
These illusions are often conscious—or almost conscious—versions of
actual life situations. For example, I heard about a young woman in
supervision: she was a musician who gave to her professional relationship
with her music teacher the secret significance of preparation for a love
affair. Once she was in analysis, her ideas about her analyst were suffused
with the same erotic significance and the belief that it would end in marriage.
These wish-fulfilling ideas are often undisclosed in analysis, where they
take the form of the patient’s belief in a secret understanding between
patient and analyst that transcends that formally acknowledged, as Freud
points out in his paper ‘Observations on Transference-love’ (Freud
1915a). The illusory special relationship may take much less
conspicuously sexual forms than the example I have quoted, whilst still
having an erotized basis.
The transference illusion is felt to protect the patient from what is
imagined to be a calamitous transference situation. As such, it poses
considerable technical problems. Whilst it persists, all the analyst’s
communications are interpreted by the patient in the light of the
illusional context.
I would like to illustrate the fears defended against by such an illusional
construction from the analysis of a male patient. He had originally been a
92 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
refugee from a foreign country but now worked as a government
scientist. He regarded his parents as having lived separate lives, although
they shared the same house. It became clear that the reality of their
relationship had given some substance to this idea but also that his fixed
mental picture was a caricature. It served as the structure for phantasies
involving each parent separately, phantasies that were never integrated,
and, though mutually contradictory, they remained adjacent to each
other, as it were in parallel.
He transferred his picture to the analytic context in a rigidly literal
way. He had a slight acquaintance with my wife in his professional
context but never brought any thoughts from that context to his ideas of
me as his analyst. He developed pictures in his mind of his analyst and of
his analyst’s wife in entirely separated contexts. Two wishful outcomes of
his analysis lay side by side. One was of a permanent partnership with me
in which he and I were alone together; the other was my death
coinciding with the end of analysis, when he would marry my widow.
This formed the basis of a complex psychic organization in which the
patient was able to oscillate between such contradictory beliefs without
ever giving them much reality, or ever giving them up. Whilst this mode
was operating in the analysis, things were always about to happen but
never did; emotional experiences were about to occur but never
materialized. The consequence for the patient’s own mental operations
was profound. Despite his considerable intellectual gifts, he was not able
to bring things together in his mind, which resulted in learning
difficulties as a child and a lack of clarity in his thinking as an adult,
which had limited his originality. The consequences for his emotional life
were a pervasive sense of unreality and a constant feeling of unfulfilment.
There was a quality of nonconsummation in all his relationships and
projects in life.
When change did begin to occur in his analysis, it provoked phantasies
of great violence. Initially they were confined to the night-time. They
took the form of murderous intercourse between the primal couple,
which filled his dreams in many forms, and when they could not be
contained within his dreams, they erupted as transitory night-time
hallucinations of a couple who were killing each other.
In contrast to this, the analysis was for a long time an ocean of calm.
Calmness was his aim, not fulfilment, and calm detachment was idealized.
For a long time this was thought by him to be the aim of analysis and the
aspiration of his analyst. Thus he thought his task was to facilitate this in
both of us by forever finding agreement. His dreams were enormously
informative but were a vehicle for getting rid of his thoughts into me, so
that he could relate to my interpretations instead of to them, and
therefore to himself second-hand. What his dreams made clear to me was
THE MISSING LINK 93
his belief that bringing his parental objects together in his mind would
result in explosion and disintegration. When the relationship between us
did begin to feel rather different in the sessions, so that we both made
more contact and yet were at greater variance, it led to fears of imminent
catastrophe.
One form this took was a fear of sudden death. In particular, he had
attacks of panic when he thought his heart was about to stop beating. His
fearful expectation of violent collision took a concrete form in the
emergence of a new fear of driving. Prior to this I had been hearing a lot
about ‘contra-flow systems’ in his sessions—both in dreams and in reports
of daily life. (At that time, some years ago, contra-flow traffic systems
were a novelty on our motorways and in the news.) I took them to be a
representation of the way my patient had segregated so carefully two
different and contradictory streams of thought. I had wondered if their
appearance in the analysis indicated that things were coming closer
together in his mind. My patient then developed a panicky conviction
when driving that unless there was a central barrier on the road, the
streams of traffic would crash into each other. It reached such
proportions that for a time it stopped him driving. This heralded changes
in the transference relationship, which now did develop within it some
conflict and opposition. The fear of finding within himself the violence
that previously had only appeared in projected forms as violent parental
intercourse became prominent for the first time. It is best conveyed by a
dream he brought after a weekend break, at a time when weekends were
very difficult and full of anxiety:
He is about to be left alone in a room with a dangerous, wild man by a couple
who are going to the theatre. This man has always been locked up and restrained
—he should be in a straitjacket. The patient is terrified that the man will
destroy everything in the room. On his own he will not be able to reason with
him. The man begins to speak. Previously, it seemed, he had been a mute.
Help comes in the form of a Senior Negotiator from the Ministry (where the
patient worked in reality). The Negotiator can speak to the Man, but if the
Man realizes that the Negotiator has connections with the law, this will
provoke him to even greater fury. (In reality, the Negotiator was concerned with
terrorists in prison.)
The patient had many associations to this dream, and they made it clear
that there was a situation in the patient’s life involving a sense of betrayal
by a woman and sexual jealousy that was connected to the dream. They
also made clear that the couple went to the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’.
This, in turn, was associated with a debate he had participated in once as
to whether a theatrical performance in a church could include the word
94 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
‘fuck’. It was clear, I thought, that the man who represented that aspect
of himself that had been mute and locked up was wild with jealousy.
That was the new element, in my patient, in his analysis. The debate as
to whether the idea of a ‘fucking couple’ could be allowed in the
‘church’ of the transference was still taking place in his analysis. My
patient’s dream suggested that he thought it an ‘absurdly’ dangerous
venture to admit into his mind phantasies of his analyst, as one of a sexual
couple, provoking a violent emotional reaction inside him. I interpreted
myself as represented by the Negotiator as well as by the parental couple.
The law that would further inflame the wild man was, I think, the law of
the Oedipus complex—the law that distinguishes the sexes and the
generations, provoking not only jealousy but also envy of the parental
couple for their sexual and procreative capacities. My intention in
describing briefly some aspects of the analysis of this patient is to illustrate
some of the fears and conflicts from which the Oedipal illusion was felt
to protect the patient.
Summary
The Oedipal situation begins with the child’s recognition of the parents’
relationship. In severe disorders development founders at this point, and
the Oedipus complex does not appear in recognizable classical form in
analysis. The failure to internalize a recognizable Oedipal triangle results
in a failure to integrate observation and experience. This was the case in
the first patient I described. I suggest that it is a consequence of a prior
failure of maternal containment.
In the second part of the chapter I described what I call Oedipal
illusions as defensive phantasies against the psychic reality of the Oedipus
situation, and suggested that if they persist, they prevent the normal
‘working through’ of the Oedipus complex, which is done through
sequences of rivalry and relinquishment.
Finally, I would like to clarify my view of the normal development of
the Oedipus complex. It begins with the child’s recognition of the nature
of the parental relationship and the child’s phantasies about it. In the
Oedipus myth this would be represented by the story of the infant
Oedipus abandoned on the hillside by his mother—a tragic version in the
child’s phantasy of being left to die whilst the parents sleep together. The
complex unfolds further in the development of the child’s rivalry with
one parent for absolute possession of the other. This we see exemplified
in the myth by the meeting at the crossroads where Laius bars the way, as
if representing the father’s obstruction of the child’s wish to re-enter
mother through her genital. This is what I regard as the psychic reality of
THE MISSING LINK 95
the Oedipus complex, as are the fears of personal or parental death as
imagined consequences.
What I have called Oedipal illusions are defensive phantasies meant to
occlude these psychic realities. In the myth I see the Oedipal illusion as
the state in which Oedipus is on the throne with his wife/mother,
surrounded by his court, turning a ‘blind eye’, as John Steiner has put it,
as to what they already half know but choose to ignore (Steiner 1985). In
this situation, where illusion reigns supreme, curiosity is felt to spell
disaster. In the phantasied tragic version of the Oedipus complex the
discovery of the Oedipal triangle is felt to be the death of the couple: the
nursing couple or the parental couple. In this phantasy the arrival of the
notion of a third always murders the dyadic relationship.
I think this idea is entertained by all of us at some time; for some it
appears to remain a conviction, and when it does it leads to serious
psychopathology. I have suggested that it is through mourning for this
lost exclusive relationship that it can be realized that the Oedipal triangle
does not spell the death of a relationship, but only the death of an idea of
a relationship.
References
Bion, W.R. (1956). Development of schizophrenic thought. Int. J. PsychoAnal., 37, 344–6. [Reprinted in Second Thoughts. London: Heinemann, 1967.]
——(1959). Attacks on linking. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 40, 308–15. [Reprinted
in Second Thoughts (pp. 93–109). London: Heinemann, 1967.]
Britton, R.S. (1985) The Oedipus complex and the depressive position.
Sigmund Freud House Bulletin, Vienna, 9, 7–12.
Freud, S. (1897). Letter 71. Extracts from the Fliess Papers. S.E.1 (pp. 263–266).
——(1915a). Observations on transference-love. S.E. 12 (pp. 157–71).
——(1924d). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. S.E. 19 (pp. 171–9).
——(1924e). The loss of reality in neurosis and psychosis. S.E. 19 (pp. 183–7).
Klein, M. (1926). The psychological principles of early analysis. Int. J. PsychoAnal., 7. [Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein, 1 (pp. 128–38).
London: Hogarth Press, 1975.]
——(1928). Early stages of the Oedipus conflict. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 9, 167–
80. [Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein, 1 (pp. 186–98). London:
Hogarth Press, 1975.]
——(1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 27, 99–
110. [Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein, 3 (pp. 1–24). London:
Hogarth Press, 1975.]
Rey, J.H. (1979). Schizoid phenomena in the borderline. In J.LeBoit & A.
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Capponi (Eds.), Advances in the Psychot herapy of the Borderline Patient (p. 449–
84). New York: Jason Aronson.
Steiner, J. (1985). Turning a blind eye: The cover up for Oedipus. Int. Rev.
Psychoanal., 12, 161–72.
PART TWO
The phallic question
97
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Introduction
Within the psychoanalytic community it was not the Oedipus complex
but the views Freud subsequently developed on female sexuality which
elicited fierce opposition, in particular his paper on the anatomical
distinction between the sexes (1925) in which he describes the wound to
a woman’s narcissism for her lack of a penis: ‘she develops, like a scar, a
sense of inferiority’. She blames her mother for her lack and abandons
masturbation which reminds her of her inadequacy: ‘the little girl’s
recognition of the anatomical distinction between the sexes forces her
away from masculinity and masculine masturbation on to new lines
which lead to the development of femininity’ (Freud 1925:256). It is
only at this point, and as a consequence of her recognition of lack,
according to Freud, that the girl turns to her father and hence enters her
Oedipus complex. Hence, femininity, for Freud, is a purely psychological
development based on this original disappointment. It is not, as it is for
other theorists, a consequence of a biological drive.
Freud’s notion of phallic monism whereby there is an early nonexistence of the vagina even in the unconscious became the centre of the
heated debate in the 1920s and 1930s known as the Freud-Jones debate.
For Freud, and this is taken up by Deutsch and Lampl-de Groot,
femininity is acquired only after an earlier masculine phase in which the
‘masculine’ clitoris is the only sexual organ. Penis envy is seen as primary
and derives from the fact that the clitoris is felt to be inferior to the penis,
which the girl blames her mother for not giving her. Jones (1927), on the
other hand, believed that ‘men analysts have been led to adopt an unduly
phallo-centric view of the problems in question, the importance of the
female organs being correspondingly underestimated’ (Jones 1938: 556).
Karen Horney and Melanie Klein were the main proponents of the socalled ‘English school’ of which Jones became the champion (‘English’,
presumably, because of Jones since Horney moved to the United States
from Berlin in 1932 after her earliest papers had been written and Klein
moved to England only in 1926). Josine Muller, basing her view on the
99
100 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
direct observation of children and on the analysis of women suffering
from frigidity, also joined their view (1932). The basic difference from
Freud’s view in the English school rested on the belief that there is an
early feminine phase in which the vagina is known and plays a role; early
vaginal sensations are believed to be of fundamental importance and lead
to specific anxieties and defences. These sensations also mean that there is
an early, primary heterosexual impulse to receive. A certain amount of
penis envy is understood as primary, but in its largest part it is thought to
be defensive by these psychoanalysts.
Horney (1926) writes that the little girl experiences from the very
beginning vaginal sensations and corresponding impulses, and hence she
has from the outset a lively sense of the specific character of her own
sexual role, and that therefore a primary penis envy of the strength
postulated by Freud is hard to account for. She makes a distinction
between a primary penis envy based on the anatomical difference
between the sexes due to the narcissistic mortification of possessing less
than the boy, and the desire to be a man in adult women which has little
to do with this and is a secondary formation to the Oedipus complex. In
renouncing the father as a sexual object, the girl recoils from the
feminine role.
The attraction to the opposite sex operates from early on and penis
envy is an expression of it: ‘in the associations of female patients the
narcissistic desire to possess the penis and the object-libidinal longing for
it are often so interwoven that one hesitates as to the sense in which the
words “desire for it” are meant’ (Horney 1926:68–9). For Horney there
is a specific and biologically determined form of feminine anxiety which
stems from the tremendous difference in size between the genitals of the
father and the little girl, and leads to a fear of destruction. In
contradistinction to this, the boy’s specific genital anxiety is a wounding
of his self-esteem (‘my penis is too small for my mother’). ‘Hence carried
back to its ultimate biological foundations, the man’s dread of the woman
is genital-narcissistic, while the woman’s dread of the man is physical.’
She suggests that direct genital masturbation is often given up by girls
because of the anxieties which cannot be assuaged as the boy can by
direct perception. Sometimes it becomes confined to the clitoris with its
lesser cathexis of anxiety and everything connected with the vagina—the
knowledge of its existence, vaginal sensations and instinctual impulses—
succumbs to a relentless repression. Castration phantasies are a secondary
formation: ‘When the woman takes refuge in the fictitious male role, her
feminine genital anxiety is to some extent translated into male terms—
the fear of vaginal injury becomes a fantasy of castration’ (1926:69). The
fiction of maleness enables the girl to escape from the female role which
is linked with guilt and dread of internal injury.
INTRODUCTION 101
Melanie Klein’s views were fairly similar on these points. She rejects
the notion of a ‘phallic phase’ in boys and girls in which only one genital,
the male one, would be known (1945). Klein believes that both the girl’s
and boy’s development include, from early infancy, genital sensations and
trends which constitute the first stages of the Oedipus complex in its
positive and inverted forms when they mingle with oral, urethral and
anal desires and phantasies. Hence the part-object nature of the early
Oedipus complex. The positive Oedipal situation reaches its climax
during the stage of genital primacy (Freud’s phallic stage) when there is a
whole-object relationship.1 In her early writings Klein considers, as
Freud did, that the girl’s turning to the father is based on hate for the
mother, but for her it is due to frustration from the breast rather than to
disappointment for her lack of the penis. She later in fact comes to
believe that it is love, not hate, which propels the search for new objects
(1945). Underlying this for Klein, it is the girl’s ‘dominant feminine
instinctual components’ which bring about the Oedipus impulses: ‘what
she [the girl] primarily wants is not to possess a penis of her own as an
attribute of masculinity, but to incorporate her father’s penis as an object
of oral satisfaction’ (Klein 1932a:196). The leading anxiety for the girl is
the dread of internal injury; while for Horney the threat came from the
father and his physically large penis, for Klein the attacks come from the
image of a mother containing a hostile penis inside her. This fear results
from the projection of the girl’s own hostility. The wish for a child,
which for Klein is primary, leads to an Oedipal rivalry with the mother
expressing itself in the impulse to rob her mother of the father’s penis
(phantasized inside the mother) and babies and consequently to the dread
of retaliation from the mother. This is a specific feminine castration
anxiety2 and is the leading anxiety situation for the girl—the dread of
attack from the mother on her feminine organs and her capacity to bear
children. This dread is later transferred to the father with a consequent
fear in relation to the penis. The dread of the mother may impel the girl
to give up identification with her and to identify with the father instead.
It is the girl’s fears concerning the inside of her body which contribute
‘in addition to the operation of biological factors’ to prevent the
emergence of a clear vaginal phase in early childhood. Nevertheless, ‘the
mental representation of the vagina exerts its full share of influence no
less than the mental representation of all the other libidinal phases, upon
the infantile genital organization of the female child’ (Klein 1932a:211).
In the Kleinian view sexual identity will develop from the ability to see
the parents as differentiated and in a relationship to each other with the
self as separate.
Jones proposed to make a distinction between the ‘proto-phallic’ phase
and the ‘deutero-phallic’ phase. In the first there is no conflict, and it is
102 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
assumed that everyone has a satisfactory male organ, penis or clitoris. In
the second there is a conscious discovery of the sex differences and this
results in envy and imitation. It is really about the deuterophallic phase
that there is an argument. Whereas for Freud the passing of this deuterophallic phase ushers the Oedipus complex (that is, turning to the father),
‘in London, on the other hand, we regard the deutero-phallic phase as
essentially a defence against the already existing Oedipus complex’ (Jones
1938:614). The desire to possess a penis of her own is a defence against
the dangers of the Oedipus complex. The girl deflects her libido into the
safer auto-erotic direction (of the wish for the penis) which marks the
denial of her femininity. This ‘phallic position’ is an emotional attitude
rather than a stage in libidinal development. Jones concludes that a
woman’s femininity develops from the promptings of an instinctual
constitution. ‘In short, I do not see a woman […] as un homme manqué, as
a permanently disappointed creature struggling to console herself with
secondary substitutes alien to her nature. The ultimate question is
whether a woman is born or made’ (Jones 1938:616).
Joan Riviere, a Kleinian analyst, also believed that ‘womanliness’ is
always present (even in the most completely homosexual woman), but it
can also be used to hide the possession of masculinity ‘much as a thief
will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not
the stolen goods’ (Riviere 1929:306). She suggests that there is not a
radical difference between genuine womanliness and ‘masquerade’.
Womanliness always exists but in some cases is used to avoid anxiety
rather than as a primary mode of sexual enjoyment.
Those who argued in favour of a primary femininity used as argument
the evidence of vaginal sensations in little girls. Freud acknowledged the
reports of female analysts of early vaginal sensations but did not feel the
need to revise his theory. He writes:
It is true that there are a few isolated reports of early vaginal sensations …
but it could not be easy to distinguish these from sensations in the
anus or vestibulum; in any case they cannot play a great part. We are
entitled to keep to our views that in the phallic phase of girls the
clitoris is the leading erotogenic zone.
(Freud 1933:118)
It may be a certain shift, though, that Freud says ‘leading’ and not ‘only’
erotogenic zone. There is no doubt that a certain amount of revision did
take place. Mack Brunswick, in a 1940 paper arising from her earlier
‘collaboration with Freud, begun in 1930’, writes that, ‘contrary to our
earlier ideas, the penis wish is not exchanged for the baby wish which…has
long preceded it. In the course of normal development the impossible is
INTRODUCTION 103
given up and the possible retained’ (Mack Brunswick 1940:245) (italics
mine). Mack Brunswick traces this wish for a baby back to an
identification with the active mother and the wish to have everything the
omnipotent and all-possessing mother has. Later in the anal phase, there
is an active wish to present the mother with a baby. The girl gives up this
active baby wish when she accepts her own castration and consequent
inability to impregnate the mother. Although this is different from
Klein’s early Oedipal wish for a baby, it is nevertheless a step away from
the view expressed in Freud’s writings of the wish for a baby replacing
the wish for a penis.
The ‘Freud-Jones debate’ as such ended in the 1930s in an impasse
because, as Mitchell suggests, ‘the concepts did not tally’, because the
battle could never take place
because it was being fought on two completely different fields….
Horney and Jones believed that the biological division of the sexes was
directly reflected in the mental life of each sex…. Freud, roughly
speaking, was arguing for a theory in which there is an important gap
between, on the one hand, biological femaleness and maleness, and on
the other psychological femininity and masculinity. He is also arguing
against a theory of symmetry between the sexes.
(Mitchell 1982:129–30).
The debate, however, remains to this day, implicit or explicit, with
Lacan the main upholder of Freud’s theory of sexual monism and the
structuring role of penis envy. Others recognize penis envy to be
important if not exclusive in femininity. Kestenberg writes:
The phase of intense penis envy is not to be construed as detrimental
to feminine development. It is not identical with the parallel phase in
the boy, but is a typically feminine avenue for identification with the
opposite sex. It paves the way to heterosexuality and the acceptance of
male children.
(1980:327)
On the whole, penis envy in contemporary writings is widely believed to
be, at least in large part, defensive in nature—displaced from the envy of
the breast (Klein), aimed at repressing feminine desires (Gibeault, Torok,
Braunschweig and Fain), wished for in order to repair a flaw in selfesteem and the relationship to the mother (Tyson 1989), aimed at
avoiding fusion with the mother and the consequent loss of identity
(Stein 1961) and so on. Phyllis Tyson concludes that penis envy can no
longer be regarded as the major organizer of femininity:
104 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
It is an important part of the early phallic phase and as such might be
considered as the developmental organizer of those masculine aspects
found in the broader sense of gender identity, but we must look to the
early identifications with the idealized mother-ego ideal in order to
understand the greater portion of the feminine personality organization.
(1982:77)
Some consider the use of the terms ‘castration anxiety’ or ‘castration
complex’ to be highly unsatisfactory when applied to the girl’s reaction
to the discovery of genital difference (Tyson 1982:73), while others
retain the term ‘castration anxiety’ to include persecutory anxieties
directed to the inside of the body (Duparc 1986).
While many writers on the subject believe that there is an early vaginal
awareness and a subsequent repression of the vagina (Barnett 1966;
Gutton 1983) and its representation in the unconscious (ChasseguetSmirgel 1964), the question of whether the ‘phallic’ phase or
components should be considered ‘masculine’ or part of ‘femininity’
remains open.
The papers in this chapter include contemporary views on Freud’s
notion of phallic monism and the role of ‘castration’ in the development
of femininity. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1976) looks to Freud’s own clinical
writings to put into question this assumption, and suggests that lack of
knowledge of the vagina results from splitting of the ego or from
repression. She suggests that the theory of phallic monism aims at
eradicating the narcissistic wound springing from the child’s helplessness
and smallness. Gillespie (1969) considers clitoridal excitation to lead to
the feminine wish to be penetrated rather than to penetrate.
The last three papers, Braunschweig and Fain (1971), Montrelay
(1978) and Gibeault (1988), I believe, show a way forward because, each
in its own way, goes beyond the opposition of the Freud—Jones debate
to show a duality which coexists in femininity, or in the case of Gibeault,
two modes of thinking which coexist.
Braunschweig and Fain suggest that women live two Oedipal conflicts,
one quasi-biological where the man’s role is limited and where there is a
primary desire to have a child as described by Melanie Klein, the other
one which comes under the aegis of the law of the father and the
castration complex as described by Freud. They suggest that there is a
general misrecognition of female sexuality which separates clitoris and
vagina out of castration anxiety and gives increased importance to the
clitoris in a fetishistic way—coming from the projection onto the girl of a
phallic phase—at the expense of the vagina. In this latter view feminine
sexuality is subordinated not to male sexuality as such or to the penis as
instrument of Eros but to phallic-narcissism (which is opposed to Eros).
INTRODUCTION 105
At the same time this phallic-narcissistic organization enables the woman
to disengage from conflicts in relation to the mother (when the conflict is
directly in relation to the mother who possesses the penis inside her in
the ‘Kleinian’ Oedipal conflict). Montrelay goes further in suggesting that
the very incompatibility of a phallic and a ‘concentric’ character of
feminine sexuality is specific to the feminine unconscious. If femininity is
a dark continent, it is, she suggests, because it ignores repression. The
early knowledge of femininity and the vagina, however, far from
facilitating maturation, prevents it in so far as it maintains erotism outside
of the representation of castration. In so far as it impedes symbolization,
this ‘concentric’ femininity remains, according to Montrelay, the ‘dark
continent’, while the ‘mature’ woman is the one who reconstructs her
sexuality in a sphere which no longer relates to her sex but to a castrated
male sex. Braunschweig and Fain also consider the repression of the
vagina to be part of normal development, and its non-repression to be
problematic.
Looking from a different vantage point, Gibeault (discussing Cosnier’s
book) considers in both men and women two modes of thinking: a
phallic logic which is an infantile theory based on sexual monism which
protects the individual from primitive anxieties, and a genital logic which
acknowledges the opposition and difference of masculine and feminine,
and that both coexist. Gibeault suggests that the binary system of the phallic/
non-phallic mode simplifies differences and hence has a role in
organizing and reassuring both sexes. In its reference to the penis as an
anatomical organ, this sexual theory plays a role in repressing Oedipal
conflicts. The bedrock, according to Cosier, is really a psychological one
in that the refusal of femininity in both sexes (penis envy in the woman,
passivity in the man) relates to the unconscious attack on the contents of
the mother’s body. This is similar to Klein’s view of the centrality of
primary envy of the mother’s creativity, body and contents, and the farreaching defensive consequences of it.
Notes
1 Klein uses the term ‘pre-genital’ rather than ‘pre-Oedipal’ to denote the
earliest phases which have other organs than the genital one as their focus of
importance, since for her the Oedipus complex is present at a much earlier
stage than the classic phallic stage.
2 François Duparc (1986) points out that the first to mention this feminine
castration anxiety is Lou Andreas-Salomé in a letter to Freud of 19 October
1917: ‘Castration anxiety in girls (e.g. after masturbation threats) frequently
takes the form of a fear of being incapable of bearing children…; the
emphasis is on this aspect instead of on threatened loss as in the case of the
106 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
boy.’ She also writes that ‘What emerges as something quite new, not
arising from analerotic memories, is in the case of the girl the fear of the
male penis, though this is closely allied to the wish to possess one for
oneself, or to appropriate it for oneself while possessing the man—the idea
of being violated etc.’
4
Freud and female sexuality: the consideration
of some blind spots in the exploration of the
‘dark continent’
JANINE CHASSEGUET-SMIRGEL
Because time is limited it will not be possible for me to deal with Freud’s
ideas on female sexuality in their entirety, even less to compare them
with opposing views expressed by other psychoanalysts. I shall therefore
speak about only those issues which have caused the greatest controversy.
Let me open this discussion with a remark of a general nature: if a
subject as fundamental as female sexuality causes such disagreement
among analysts after almost 80 years of clinical experience, it must be
because it stirs up certain internal factors in a particularly intense way
which somehow interfere with our progress towards knowledge. Our
differences of opinion about female sexuality are such that in the mêlée
we lose sight of the truth.
A correlative comment comes to mind: divergencies in our
understanding of female sexuality inevitably breed corresponding
differences of opinion concerning male sexuality. Bisexuality, the notion
of a ‘complete’ Oedipus—both negative and positive—the necessity for
dual identification, all conspire to cast the shadow of the ‘dark continent’
on to male sexuality. It seems to me artificial and fallacious to abstract the
study of female sexuality completely from that of the femininity common
to both sexes and of human sexuality in general.
I shall therefore restrict my study of Freud’s work on female sexuality
to the discussion of some essential points; but at the same time I find
myself forced to broaden the scope of these very same issues.
I shall examine the theory of sexual phallic monism and its most
important consequences; I shall try to formulate certain hypotheses
which I have developed on other occasions, with the idea in mind of
showing how Freudian theories of female sexuality have endured in spite
of the opposing clinical material which has come to light, in spite of the
undeniable contradictions these theories reveal, and finally in spite of
those theories which have lent a completely different dimension to
female sexuality. I shall express a personal view on these matters,
particularly on the topic of penis envy; yet my study will remain very
107
108 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
much within a Freudian perspective; my basic assumptions being rooted
in the question of ‘human prematurity’, which is linked to the child’s
early helplessness (Hilflosigkeit).
The Midrash, a Talmudic commentary, recounts that when a child is
born he is endowed with universal knowledge; but an angel appears,
touches the new-born’s upper lip with his finger and the child’s
knowledge vanishes into oblivion. It would seem that this legend, which
one can imagine as representative of primary repression, is illustrative of
theories of infantile sexuality and, in particular, the central one of sexual
phallic monism and the correlative ignorance of the vagina, which is
shared by both sexes. These theories replace what is probably an innate
knowledge. We know, however, that for Freud sexual phallic monism
and ignorance of the vagina are not defensive elaborations tied to
repression: the vagina is non-existent for both sexes, even in the
unconscious, and this lasts until puberty. This postulate is repeated
throughout his work, beginning with the ‘Three Essays’ (Freud 1905); it
appears again in ‘Femininity’ (Freud 1933) and finally in the ‘Outline’
(Freud 1940). (An important ‘watershed’ expression of this idea can be
found in Freud 1923.) It is noteworthy that in the latter texts Freud is
aware of the controversy inspired by the existence of early vaginal desires
but he dismisses it abruptly. In ‘Femininity’ he writes (Freud 1933:118):
‘It is true that there are a few isolated reports of early vaginal sensations as
well, but it could not be easy to distinguish these from sensations in the
anus or vestibulum; in any case they cannot play a great part.’
In the ‘Outline’ we find in a note Freud’s refutation of the ‘supporters’
of the vagina: ‘The occurrence of early vaginal excitations is often
asserted. But it is most probably that what is in question are excitations in
the clitoris—that is, in an organ analogous to the penis. This, does not
invalidate our right to describe the phase as phallic’ (Freud 1940:154).
In his article on ‘Female Sexuality’ Freud (1931) answers his
opponents on this idea for the first time; his answer is astonishing:
A man, after all, has only one leading sexual zone, one sexual organ,
whereas a woman has two: the vagina—the female organ proper—and
the clitoris, which is analogous to the male organ. We believe we are
justified in assuming that for many years the vagina is virtually nonexistent and possibly does not produce sensations until puberty. It is
true that an increasing number of observers report that vaginal
impulses are present even in these early years. In women, therefore [my
italics], the main genital occurrences of childhood must take place in
relation to the clitoris.
(p. 228)
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 109
It is obvious that when Freud refutes these theories he takes into account
the existence or non-existence of early vaginal sensations; but he does
not recognize that the existence (at least unconscious) of the vagina
would completely upset the theory of female sexuality, particularly in our
understanding of the female Oedipus, of the girl’s wish for the paternal
penis and the wish to have a child, all of which would become in this
respect, primary and fundamentally feminine. The boy child is completely
unaware of the vagina’s existence and imagines that all human beings
possess a penis, including his mother. This is stated plainly in the ‘Three
Essays’ (Freud 1905), while at the same time, erections of the penis
before puberty and concomitant wishes for penetration are denied. (‘The
processes at puberty thus establish the primacy of the genital zones; and
in a man, the penis, which has now become capable of erection, presses
forward insistently towards the new sexual aim—penetration into a cavity
…’) In his paper ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ Freud (1908)
takes into account a number of observations stemming from the case of
Little Hans (Freud 1909). What he describes is quite apropos of what I
am trying to say here:
If children could follow the hints given by the excitation of the penis
they would get a little nearer to the solution of their problem. That
the baby grows inside the mother’s body is obviously not a sufficient
explanation. How does it get inside? What starts its development?
That the father has something to do with it seems likely; he says that
the baby is his baby as well. Again, the penis certainly has a share, too,
in these mysterious happenings; the excitation in it which
accompanies all these activities of the child’s thoughts bears witness to
this. Attached to this excitation are impulsions which the child cannot
account for—obscure urges to do something violent, to press in, to
knock to pieces, to tear open a hole somewhere. But when the child
thus seems to be well on the way to postulating the existence of the
vagina and to concluding that an incursion of this kind by his father’s
penis into his mother is the act by means of which the baby is created
in his mother’s body—at this juncture his enquiry is broken off in
helpless perplexity. For standing in its way is his theory that his
mother possesses a penis just as a man does, and the existence of the
cavity which receives the penis remains undiscovered by him.
(Freud 1908:218)
It is noteworthy that later Freud (1924, and especially 1940) pictures the
male child wishing only to be near his mother, indulging in vague and
imprecise contacts which imply his penis only in an obscure way.
110 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
I would like to take up here some aspects of the observations in the
Little Hans case (Freud 1909) which seem to me to contradict the ‘fuzzy’
quality of the excitation of the little boy’s penis and to bring into
question the entire theory of sexual phallic monism, or rather, to put into
very evident relief its essentially defensive nature; thus, simultaneously,
we can raise the issue of the equally defensive character of the sexual
theories of children in general. We perceive that a complete and intuitive
knowledge of sexuality (which is quite unacceptable for many reasons),
underlies these theories; this knowledge is complete and intuitive because
it is instinctual. How can we possibly imagine the girl to be unaware of
the fact that she possesses a vagina when Freud (1917) attributes to the
dream the power to discover early on all of the organic changes to come
(this is the dream’s ‘diagnostic aptitude’). Why should the unconscious,
which possesses the means for awareness of our bodily intimacy, be
blocked when it comes to the vagina? Why should the boy not be aware
of an organ complementary to his own since Freud postulates elsewhere
the existence of innate primary fantasies?
When Hans was three and a half years old, his little sister Hanna was
born. His father jotted down in his notebook that day:
At five in the morning, labour began, and Hans’s bed was moved into
the next room. He woke up there at seven and, hearing his mother
groaning asked: ‘Why’s Mummy coughing?’ Then, after a pause, ‘The
stork’s coming to-day for certain…’. Later on he was taken into the
kitchen. He saw the doctor’s bag in the front hall and asked: ‘What’s
that?’ ‘A bag’, was the reply. Upon which he declared with
conviction: ‘The stork’s coming to-day.’ After the baby’s delivery the
midwife came into the kitchen and Hans heard her ordering some tea
to be made. At this he said: ‘I know! Mummy’s to have some tea
because she’s coughing.’ He was then called into the bedroom. He did
not look at his mother, however, but at the basins and other vessels,
filled with blood and water, that were still standing about the room.
Pointing to the blood-stained bed-pan, he observed in a surprised
voice: ‘But blood doesn’t come out of my widdler.’
(Freud 1909:10)
It seems to me that this excerpt reveals that Hans knew that delivery was
painful because he was able to link his mother’s groaning to the coming
of the stork. For certain reasons (he probably felt invaded by those
sensations connected to his sadistic feelings and the subsequent feelings of
guilt) he still preferred to transform the groans into coughs, which are less
worrisome. He also connected, at the same time, the doctor’s bag and
the arrival of the stork. He therefore knew very well that everything was
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 111
going to happen inside his mother’s body. Moreover, without having
been present at the birth, he was aware that the child had come out
through the mother’s genital organs since he associates his and her
‘widdler’ with the blood.
It should be noted that nothing justifies Freud in assigning to the
widdler (‘wiwi-macher’) an exclusively male meaning throughout the
text; and when Hans asks his mother if she has a widdler too and she
answers, ‘Of course, why?’ (p. 7), it is not necessary to think that she was
lying to him because she too possesses genito-urinary organs; Hans’s
question could be understood as expressing his curiosity concerning the
differences between the sexes, of which he was very well aware on a
certain level. To demonstrate this idea, let us turn to some of the facts.
Just before the outbreak of his phobia he went into his mother’s bed in
an attempt to seduce her, saying: ‘Do you know what Aunt M. said? She
said: “He has got a dear little thingummy”’ (p. 23). Yes, a dear
thingummy, but a little one. Not a big one like the horses. This was the
beginning of a constant theme, the comparison between his little penis
and the big penises of animals he envied; this provoked in him a fear of
horses biting his fingers and a more vague fear with regard to animals
possessing obvious phallic traits: the giraffe (because of its long neck), the
elephant (because of its trunk), the pelican (because of its bill). Freud
writes that Hans’s statement, ‘my widdler will get bigger as I get bigger’,
allows us to conclude that in the course of his observations Hans never
stopped comparing and remained forever unsatisfied with the dimensions
of his widdler (and in fact one can imagine that a part of his phobia
derived from his wish to steal the big widdlers of the horses and the other
phallic animals, which would then come back to threaten him. The fallen
horses, the objects of Hans’s terror, can be considered, on a certain level,
castrated: fallen being the opposite of erect);1 his wish for a big widdler
remained an issue for a long time. Hans’s father, like Freud, concluded
that Hans feared ‘that his mother did not like him, because his widdler
was not comparable to his father’s’. The fulfilment of this wish is played
out in the fantasy of the plumber coming to give him a big widdler.
Where does this wish for a penis as big as the father’s originate, if Hans
has no idea that his mother possesses an organ that his ‘dear little
thingummy’ is incapable of (ful)filling? His knowledge of the mother’s
vagina appears in two fantasies he tells his father: (1) ‘I was with you in
Schönbrunn where the sheep are; and then we crawled under the ropes,
and then we told the policeman at the end of the garden and he grabbed
hold of both of us’ (p. 40); (2) ‘I went with you in the train, and we
smashed a window and the policeman took us off with him’ (p. 41). The
idea that his penis is too small for his mother’s vagina appears again, I
think, in his fear that his mother would drop him during his bath into
112 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
the big bathtub. That this fear issued from his wish that his mother
would drop Hanna during her bath does not invalidate this hypothesis.
Like the child who said apropos of the new arrival in his nursery, ‘the
stork should take it away again’ (Freud 1908:212), Hans was just as
capable of sending Hanna back where she came from (the mother’s
vagina). Later Hans talked about the big box (the mother’s womb):
‘Really Daddy. Do believe me. We got a big box and it was full of
babies; they sat in the bath’ (Freud 1909:69). To my mind, this is the vagina.
We cannot fail to recognize in little Hans’s fantasies and phobia an
Oedipal wish implying the genital possession of the mother with the help of a
penis robbed from his father.
But what is striking is that Freud sees this too—the material leaves
little room for any other interpretation—and yet, in spite of this, he
continues to uphold the theory of sexual phallic monism and the
accompanying ignorance of the vagina. He says, in fact (Freud 1909):
Some kind of vague notion was struggling in the child’s mind of
something he might do with his mother by means of which his taking
possession of her would be consummated; for this elusive thought he
found certain pictorial representations, which had in common the
qualities of being violent and forbidden, and the content of which
strikes us as fitting in most remarkably well with the hidden truth. We
can only say that they were symbolic phantasies of intercourse.
(pp. 122–3)
And further:
But this father…had been his model…his father not only knew where
children came from, he actually performed it—the thing that Hans
could only obscurely divine. The widdler must have something to do
with it, for his own grew excited whenever he thought of these things—
and it must be a big widdler too, bigger than Hans’s own. If he
listened to these premonitory sensations he could only suppose that it
was a question of some act of violence performed upon his mother, of
smashing something, of making an opening into something, of forcing
a way into an enclosed space—such were the impulses that he felt
stirring within him.
(pp. 134–5)
At this point, when we think Freud is on the verge of identifying the
existence of the vagina at least on the preconscious level in little Hans’s
psyche, he surprises us with this strange conclusion:
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 113
But although the sensations of his penis had put him on the road to
postulating a vagina, yet he could not solve the problem, for within
his experiences no such thing existed as his widdler required. On the
contrary, his conviction that his mother possessed a penis just as he did
stood in the way of any solution.
(p. 135)
Freud’s conjectures here appear contradictory: firstly, contrary to what he
claimed (Freud, 1905) and to what he continued to claim in later works,
the boy’s wishes for penetration exist well before puberty and so does the
‘obscure’ and ‘premonitory’ existence of the vagina. It would be
impossible to prove in any decisive way if at any moment Hans thought
that his mother’s widdler was a penis, and even so, this representation
would have to be superimposed on that of the vagina. One might ask: if
his conviction does indeed stand in the way of any solution, as Freud has
written, is this representation then perhaps a defensive one—and if this is
true, how? One can imagine Freud’s answer: the fear of castration would
drive the little boy to see a penis where there isn’t one. But the fear of
castration springing from the sight of the female genital organs without a
penis is all the more powerful, according to Freud, precisely because the
child is ignorant of the vagina’s existence. He therefore imagines a sex
not just different from his own, but—horrors!—an absence of sex.
I believe, in fact, that none of these difficulties would arise if, like with
the child in the Midrash, we considered that little boys and girls were
completely knowledgeable about sexuality; but that this knowledge is
then tampered with by a series of repressions, of a defensive nature,
which result first from the pressure of unbearable excitations, and then
afterwards from conflictual situations. (The idea of an ‘instinctive
knowledge’ and even an ‘instinctive patrimony’ stemming from the
processes of sexual life and constituting the nuclear centre of the
unconscious was not foreign to Freud, 1918, but he refuses, in my
opinion, to draw the logical consequences which necessarily follow.
Freud was perhaps afraid that this conception would be exploited for the
purposes of Jungian theory.) This would explain why the child shapes his
own sexual theories according to his stage of development. The child
lives on two planes: that of his profound knowledge, possessed
instinctively, of sexuality, and that of his development, his wishes, his
defences which gauge the information the child receives during the
course of his growth. Sexual education is therefore caught between two
dimensions: the child’s unconscious on the one hand, to which nothing
can be taught which it does not already know and, on the other, his own
sexual theories which he elaborates for his own purposes and which give
answer, in principle, to what he feels he can stand at any one stage of his
114 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
development. When children are informed of sexual matters there is
always the possibility that the adult will find himself in Hans’s father’s
situation when he said to him (Freud 1909:95) ‘but you know quite well
boys can’t have babies’, to which came the reply, ‘Well yes. But I believe
they can, all the same.’
My hypothesis is that the theory of sexual phallic monism corresponds not to
the lack of knowledge of the vagina but to a splitting of the ego (‘Well, yes. But
I believe they can, all the same’) or to the repression of an earlier piece of
knowledge. This hypothesis has already been formulated by Josine Muller,
Karen Horney, Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones. However, I hope to put
my subject into a different perspective.
Before presenting my hypothesis in full, I would like to discuss
another famous clinical text of Freud’s, the analysis of the Wolf Man
(Freud 1918). If little Hans’s phobia is focused on the positive Oedipus,
the “infantile neurosis’ of the Wolf Man is focused on the negative
Oedipus, the wish to assist the paternal coitus, to take the mother’s place in
the primal scene. We know that the child witnessed at the age of one and
a half the famous scene of coitus a tergo between his parents and that he
dreamed his wolf-dream when he was four years old. In Freud’s estimate,
the reactivation of the primal scene in the dream directed the child
towards genital organization, a discovery of the vagina (cf. Freud
1918:64). This is in contradiction with his theory of the discovery of the
vagina in puberty. In a strange way Freud assumes that observing the
coitus a tergo convinced the child ‘that castration was the necessary
condition of femininity’ (p. 78). Our first objection is that in this position
the vagina is not visible. Furthermore, we are again faced with the
equivocal role the vagina plays in the masculine castration complex,
because, in this instance, the vagina is held responsible, above all, for the
Wolf Man’s castration fears: the vagina is precisely the wound the father
leaves after castration. Freud claims, nevertheless, that the child represses
his knowledge of the vagina, and adopts instead his first theory of anal
sexual intercourse:
But now came the new event that occurred when he was four years
old. What he had learnt in the meantime, the allusions which he had
had to castration, awoke, and cast a doubt on the “cloacal theory’;
they brought to his notice the difference between the sexes and the
sexual part played by women. In this contingency he behaved as
children in general behave when they are given an unwished-for piece
of information—whether sexual or of any other kind. He rejected
what was new (in our case from motives connected with his fear of
castration) and clung fast to what was old. He decided in favour of the
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 115
intestine and against the vagina… He rejected the new information
and clung to the old theory.
(Freud 1918:79)
Here again we come across theoretical suggestions which contradict
other statements we find elsewhere in his work. Freud (1937) describes
passivity, in any form, as sufficient to stir up fears of castration in men;
actual penetration is not necessary to awaken these fears of losing the
penis. Anal penetration, a fortiori, does not prevent man from fearing
castration. The fear of passivity, we know, is the ‘bedrock’ of the
psychoanalysis of males:
At no other point in one’s analytic work does one suffer more from an
oppressive feeling that all one’s repeated efforts have been in vain, and
from a suspicion that one has been ‘preaching to the winds’, than …
when one is seeking to convince a man that passive attitude to men
does not always signify castration and that it is indispensable in many
relationships in life.
(Freud 1937:252)
Furthermore, it is striking that the wishes for penetration by the father’s
penis were active in the Wolf Man’s case when he observed the parental
coitus (at the age of one and a half) and were revived in his dream (at
four years of age), and yet the same wish for penetration arises in the
girl’s case only in puberty. The Wolf Man, like Schreber (Freud 1911)
wished to have a child by his father, an instinctual wish tied to his
feminine identification, while the girl’s wish is only a substitute for, an
ersatz version of, her penis envy (Freud 1925). The man’s feminine
wishes to be penetrated and to have babies by the father would therefore
be more direct than the woman’s. We should bear in mind that these
wishes constitute for the male individual the nucleus of delusion.
Moreover, we know that Freud (1931:229) asserts in his article on
‘Female Sexuality’: ‘It is only in the male child that we find the fateful
combination of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred for the
other as a rival.’
Freud considers the pre-Oedipal phase more significant in the
woman’s case than in the man’s. He claims (Freud 1931) that sometimes
the girl never attains her positive Oedipal phase, and during the phase of
her negative Oedipus complex ‘a little girl’s father is not much else for
her than a troublesome rival’ (p. 226). If the girl does reach the positive
Oedipal phase, her relationship to her father is merely a continuation of
the relationship she enjoyed with her mother: ‘Except for the change of
116 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
her love-object, the second phase had scarcely added any new feature to
her erotic life’ (p. 225).
If we carry these statements to their logical conclusion, can we not say
that in Freudian theory the father is more of an object for the boy than
for the girl?
Penis envy, in the girl’s case, is a derivative of sexual phallic monism.
The Freudian conception implies that from the moment when the girl
discovers the penis’s existence, a discovery that antecedes the Oedipal
phase, to the moment in puberty when she discovers the existence of her
vagina, she is, in her own eyes, a castrated individual with a truncated
penis; the clitoris. This fact makes her turn away from her mother who
did not offer her a penis and drives her into the Oedipus complex so as
to obtain from her father the desired organ, a desire which in happy
circumstances turns into the wish for a child, and preferably a male one.
The woman’s sexual desire for the penis is absolutely subordinate to or
has been flattened out by her narcissistic envy. Penis envy is primary, the
feminine erotic wishes are secondary.
But, as we all know, the woman’s psychosexual trials and tribulations
do not end here. Since the little girl’s sexuality is in the final account
male, and exclusively focused on the clitoris—the external ‘feminine’
genital parts, as Freud significantly calls them, do not come into play at
all, even in seduction. Once the girl arrives at puberty she has to give up
her cathexis of her ‘male’ organ (the clitoris) and turn towards her
internal feminine organs. ‘What is thus overtaken by repression is a piece
of masculine sexuality’ (Freud 1905:221). The clitoris that remains the
focus (it should only serve as a transmitter of excitability, ‘pine shavings’
for the kindling of a fire) is at the root of female frigidity and predisposes
the subject to the neuroses, most particularly hysteria. Gillespie (1975)
poses the following question in relationship to this issue: ‘Does not
Freud’s theory of the pseudo-masculine clitoris which has to be given up
imply an insistence that the female must be castrated…?
We know that the clitoris plays a role for the entire duration of the
sexual act and for the duration of a normal woman’s lifetime. Jones
(1933) implied this when he wrote that ‘after all, the clitoris is a part of
the female genital organs’.
I think that we can now list the principal points which have been
raised in my discussion of the Freudian theory of female sexuality as it
stands in relationship to the theory of sexual phallic monism:
the boy’s ignorance of the mother’s vagina;
the girl’s ignorance of her own vagina;
the girl’s exclusive cathexis of the clitoris, the equivalent to a
truncated penis;
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 117
the necessary renunciation of this cathexis at puberty;
the girl’s psychosexuality is dominated by the unsatisfiable envy for
the male organ;
the boy’s wish to be penetrated by the father’s penis and to have his
babies is more direct than the girl’s;
the positive Oedipal phase is never attained by some women;
the female positive Oedipus complex is only the displacement of
the woman’s relationship to her mother on to her father;
maternity is an ‘ersatz’ masculinity which in fact can never be attained.
Female sexuality is therefore a series of lacks: the lack of a vagina, lack of
a penis, lack of a specific sexuality, lack of an adequate erotic object, and
finally the lacks which are implied by her being devoid of any intrinsic
feminine qualities which he could cathect directly and by her being
forced to give up the clitoris. We can add the relative lack of a superego
and the capacity for sublimation, issues which I shall not be able to
discuss here. The boy’s sexuality is so much more full: he possesses an
adequate sexual organ, a sexuality which is specific from the outset, and
two love objects to satisfy the requirements of both tendencies of the
Oedipus complex.
Now the woman as she is depicted in Freudian theory is exactly the opposite of
the primal maternal imago as it is revealed in the clinical material of both
sexes. This could be a mere coincidence, but the contradictions we have
been able to discern throughout Freud’s work on the problem of sexual
phallic monism and its consequences, force us to take closer notice of this
opposition between the woman, as she is described by Freud, and the mother as
she is known to the Unconscious.
What astonishes us in all of this is not that Freud’s pathways to
knowledge were blocked in certain areas of his work, but that in spite of
this he was able to pursue his researches so successfully and so far. The
issue is this: this theory still enjoys a solid reputation because, ultimately,
it has withstood the centra-indications of certain clinical and theoretical
arguments, and has withstood the pressure of its own internal contradictions.
The theory of sexual phallic monism (and its derivatives) seems to me to
eradicate the narcissistic wound which is common to all humanity, and springs
from the child’s helplessness, a helplessness which makes him completely
dependent on his mother.
As early as 1895, in the ‘Project’ (Freud, 1950) Freud already began to
place emphasis on the human being’s condition of helplessness in infancy,
and the situation of dependency it entails. Subsequently (Freud 1915) he
attributes the separation between the ego and non-ego to the infant’s
helplessness (Hilflosigkeit): ‘the primal narcissistic state would not be able
to [develop] if it were not for the fact that every individual passes
118 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
through a period during which he is helpless [my italics] and has to be
looked after and during which his pressing needs are satisfied by an
external agency’ (p. 135n).
Later, (Freud 1926) he again mentions the helplessness of the human
being, whose
intra-uterine existence seems to be short in comparison with that of
most animals, and it is sent into the world in a less finished state. As a
result, the influence of the real external world upon it is intensified
and an early differentiation between the ego and the id is promoted.
Moreover, the dangers of the external world have a greater
importance for it, so that the value of the object which can alone
protect it against them and take the place of its former intra-uterine
life is enormously enhanced. The biological factor, then, establishes
the earliest situations of danger and creates the need to be loved which
will accompany the child through the rest of its life.
(pp. 154–5)
The human being’s dependency on his mother, who is absolutely
necessary for his survival, causes for the most part, as we all know, the
formation of an omnipotent maternal imago. As the child grows, he
gains, through his psychophysiological maturation and identifications
greater and greater freedom. Nevertheless, his psyche remains forever
marked by his primary helplessness, especially since it follows hard upon
an earlier state of completeness in which every need was automatically
satisfied (I am alluding to the foetal state and to the very short period
when we can assume that the ego and non-ego are not yet
differentiated). Because the child is faced with a discrepancy between his
incestuous wishes and his ability to satisfy them, a discrepancy which
springs from man’s biological chronology—this is a point that
Grunberger (1956, 1966) has stressed—the child’s experiences of these
wishes become a real drama. Here again, helplessness is at the heart of the
problem.
Let us remember the bleak picture Freud (1920) paints of the Oedipal child:
The early efflorescence of infantile sexual life is doomed to extinction
because its wishes are incompatible with reality and with the
inadequate stage of development the child has reached. The
efflorescence comes to an end in the most distressing circumstances
and to the accompaniment of the most painful feelings. Loss of love
and failure leave behind them a permanent injury to self-regard in the
form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion, as well as in
Marcinowski’s…, contributes more than anything else to the ‘sense of
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 119
inferiority’ which is so common in neurotics. The child’s sexual
researches, on which limits are imposed by his physical development,
lead to no satisfactory conclusion; hence such later complaints as ‘I
can’t accomplish anything; I can’t succeed in anything.’ The tie of
affection, which binds the child as a rule to the parent of the opposite
sex, succumbs to disappointment, to a vain expectation of satisfaction
or to jealousy over the birth of a new baby—unmistakable truth of the
infidelity of the object of the child’s affections. His own attempt to
make a baby himself, carried out with tragic seriousness, fails
shamefully. The lessening amount of affection he receives, the
increasing demands of education, hard words and an occasional
punishment—these show him at last the full extent to which he has
been scorned.
(pp. 20–1)
Renunciation of the Oedipal object, in this context, seems to be tied to
the child’s pained recognition of his smallness, of his insufficiencies. This
is the tragedy of lost illusions. The theory of sexual phallic monism
maintains these illusions. McDougall (1972) has pointed out that the sight
of the female genitalia without a penis not only inspires the child with
fright because it confirms the possibility of castration, but it also requires
the child to recognize the role of the father’s penis and to accept the
primal scene.
In my opinion, reality is not only founded in the difference between
the sexes, but also in the absolute correlative, the difference between the
generations. The reality is not that the mother has been castrated but that
she possesses a vagina that the child is utterly unable to (ful)fill. The
reality is that the father possesses a penis that the little boy does not have
(the big widdler that Little Hans envied), and genital faculties the child
does not possess. When the child is forced to heed the difference
between the sexes and their complementarity, he simultaneously comes
to realize the difference between the generations. This causes a narcissistic
wound that the theory of sexual phallic monism tries to erase: if in the Oedipal
phase the child was devoid of any wishes to penetrate his mother, of any
knowledge of his mother’s vagina, he would have no reason to envy his
father whose capabilities would then be not much different from his
own; if his mother were willing, and his father did not object, he too
could engage in those vague and imprecise ‘contacts’. The Oedipal boy
preserves in this way a measure of his narcissism. In fact, this corresponds
to the perverted temptation to render pregenital wishes and satisfactions
(within the little boy’s reach) equivalent to, or even to value them more
highly than genital wishes and satisfactions (which are only within the
father’s reach). A very clear expression of this temptation is to be found
120 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
in the analysis of Little Hans, when he states his wish to beat horses and
finally, as he confesses, to beat his mother: for a little boy, it is, in fact,
easier to do this than to attempt to have genital coitus with an adult woman.
Other narcissistic advantages are contained in the theory of sexual
phallic monism: if the mother is without a vagina, the little boy, in terms
of the inverted Oedipus complex, can satisfy the father just as much as
the mother can. Many homosexuals entertain this fantasy; they believe
that the anus, which they have genitalized, and the vagina are equivalent.
The supposed lack of knowledge of the vagina offers the male child
narcissistic benefits on both the negative and positive planes of the
Oedipus complex.
The need for sexual phallic monism finds its origin in two different
dimensions of the child’s relationship to the mother: on the one hand,
the archaic omnipotent mother and on the other, the Oedipal mother; in
both instances the child experiences with pain the inadequacy linked to
his helplessness. The wish to break away from the primal mother drives
children of both sexes to project her power on to the father and his
penis, and to more or less decathect specifically maternal qualities and
organs. If the relationship to the mother has been a sufficiently good one
(for external as well as internal reasons) the male child will choose his
father as his model (as in the case of Little Hans) so he can be like him
and one day possess his mother. He will then cathect his own penis with
an actual sexual and narcissistic value, but one which is to be truly
realized only in the future. He will not, however, entirely abandon his
narcissistic cathexis of the maternal faculties and organs: breasts, vagina,
the possibility of bringing children into the world. This process leads him
to develop according to the norms of his own sex, yet without, in a state
of reaction, devaluating the feminine elements; he will thus be able to
integrate his femininity and increase his capacity to understand the wishes
of his partner in love relationships. If his relationship to the archaic
mother has been very sour, he can completely remove his narcissistic
cathexis from the maternal prerogatives and place it entirely on the
paternal penis and his own. Because he will so thoroughly disdain the
maternal traits, he will find great difficulty in integrating his femininity, if
he does not find it simply impossible. He rejects any re-sexualization of
his passive homosexual impulses; he finds it horrifying. Re-sexualization
is rejected by the ego precisely because the reaction-cathexis of the penis
has absorbed the bulk of the narcissistic libido; femininity is thereafter
divested of this libidinal content. This would help to explain, in my
opinion, the conflicting character of the male’s passive homosexual
wishes, because the erotism driving the subject towards his father is
connected precisely to a devaluation of femininity, and therefore to that
of his own. In these cases a violent opposition breaks out between
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 121
homosexuality and narcissism. I think this is one of the reasons amongst
the many others cited by other analysts, why with patients revealing
paranoid features it is necessary to analyse the maternal relationship early
on in treatment.2
Freud attributed to man a ‘natural scorn’ for women. This scorn
originated in the fact of their lack of a penis. My experience has shown
me that underlying this scorn one always finds a powerful maternal
imago, envied and terrifying (see also Chasseguet-Smirgel 1964).
A passing devaluation of the mother and women is ‘normal’ and allows
the boy to cathect narcissistically his own sexual identity, but it should
not be prolonged into adulthood except in the guise of protective
feelings towards the woman. Scorn in the adult is never ‘normal’ and
reveals personal uncertainty about one’s own self-worth. It can be,
among other things, the manifestation of a phallic-narcissistic regression.
Of course what I said earlier about the defensive nature of the theory of
sexual phallic monism does not expel Jones’s theses, for instance his thesis
on the phallic phase, but contributes to our understanding (at least I hope
it does this) of the defensive character of that phase that protects the
subject not only from his fears of castration on the Oedipal level but also
from the narcissistic wound tied to his intrinsic insufficiencies.
In contrast to the subject presenting paranoid symptoms stands the
transsexualist who through plastic surgery removes his male
characteristics to fabricate a vagina in their place. For precise ‘historical’
reasons linked to his relationship to his parents he was probably unable to
project his ego ideal on to his father and his penis. His narcissistic
cathexis never detached itself from the maternal feminine attributes of the
archaic mother. The male’s femininity, his homosexual position are,
because of the complex factors we have just described, borne by multiple
defensive and instinctual forces:
classical regression before the Oedipal phase and fear of castration by
the father;
impossibility of identification with a sadistic father;
‘normal’ identification with the mother in the primal scene, on the
level of the inverted Oedipus complex and the integration of femininity;
the envious wish to acquire the father’s big penis through
incorporation, with the goal in mind of paternal identification in
the hope of possessing the mother in the positive Oedipus complex;
the wish to be the omnipotent mother and to possess her attributes
which continue to be narcissistically cathected (this wish
can, consequently, be perfectly ego-syntonic);
the wish to be the mother so that fusion can occur and separationanxiety be avoided;
122 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
the wish to be penetrated passively by the mother’s anal phallus (I
can only allude to this position here);
the wish to escape the omnipotent mother by decathecting those
attributes which belong to her, and by ‘gluing’ oneself to the
father and his penis.
The need to detach oneself from the primal omnipotent mother by
denying her faculties, her organs and her specifically feminine features,
and by investing in the father, seems to be a need which both sexes share.
Bachofen (1861) has studied the transformation of matriarchies into
patriarchies. The existence of matriarchal civilizations raises many
problems, but Bachofen’s work nevertheless touches upon a profound
psychological truth, because we can thus observe projected on to the
history of civilizations the individual adventure of development in men
and women.
A psychoanalyst to the end, Bachofen answered Momsen, who had
challenged his theses, that personal reasons must underlie Momsen’s
refusal to accept the existence of matriarchies. Bachofen thought that
Aeschylus’ Eumenides described the transition from matriarchal to
patriarchal law. We know that this play is the narrative of Orestes’ trial
after he murdered his mother. He had acted to avenge his father,
Agamemnon, who had been assassinated by Clytemnestra. The Erinyes,
who at the end of the play become the Eumenides, are daughters of the
night, chthonian, subterranean divinities who reigned before the time of
Zeus (like the mother who reigns before the father). They are the
prosecutors at the trial. They are described as ‘the gloomy children of the
night’. Apollo, at whose specific command Orestes had set out to avenge
his father, heads the defence. Orestes appeals to Athene who was born
without maternal involvement; she was born straight from the head of
Zeus, fully armed and helmeted and thus escaped primal infantile
helplessness. She creates a court, the Areopagus, in the very place where
the Amazons had been, before they had been defeated by Theseus; in this
way the Erinyes lose their legal prerogative as judges. The Erinyes protest:
Here is overthrow of all
the young laws, if the claim
of this matricide shall stand
good, his crime be sustained.
The Erinyes believe that Clytemnestra’s crime is less of an offence than
Orestes’ because ‘The man she killed was not of blood congenital.’
Orestes makes the astonishing retort: ‘But am I then involved with my
mother by blood-bond?’ Apollo supports Orestes:
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 123
The mother is no parent of that which is called
her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed
that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A
stranger she
preserves a stranger’s seed, if no god interfere.
I will show you proof of what I have explained.
There can
be a father without any mother. There she stands,
the living witness, daughter of Olympian Zeus…
Athene approves of this speech and claims to be ‘strongly on [her]
father’s side’. (This conception of birth should be compared to the one
Sade postulates on several occasions.) Orestes is acquitted. The Erinyes lament:
Darkness of Night, our mother, are you here to
watch?…
Gods of the younger generation, you have ridden
down
the laws of the elder time, torn them out of my
hands
and threaten the country with the worst disaster. The Erinyes are finally
promised that they will be made into a cult. They calm down, are made
the Eumenides; the play has a happy, festive ending.
It is noteworthy that Athene, a woman, and Apollo, a man, band
together to deny the maternal prerogatives.
The girl’s penis envy seems to me not to rest upon her ignorance of
the vagina and her subsequent feelings of castration (although certain
conflicts which arise in this relation almost oblige her to repress her
knowledge of this organ; this repression is perhaps normal as has been
indicated by Braunschweig and Fain (1971) but on her need to beat back
the maternal power.
I would like to report a session which I mentioned at the last London
Congress. I think it very clearly illustrates what I am driving at. I hope
that those who are already familiar with this material will forgive me for
repeating it here:
The woman patient was the third in a family of five children. She has
two older brothers. A brother and then a sister were born after her.
She began the session by complaining about her being with a woman
analyst; since women are inferior to men, she was not going to get
anything out of being with me (this was a recurring theme). Then she
told her dream. She is in a theatre. A woman is standing on the stage
124 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
exposing one breast which is very big, round and swollen. The patient
said that the previous day she had read in an article about an actress
who was in a very special kind of show in Paris in which she would
undress in a very obscene way while insulting the public whom she
mocked and humiliated. In her dream the patient is in the hall,
amongst the spectators, with her brother and a friend of his. At the
actress’s feet there is a little 18-month-old boy. At a particular
moment the actress throws herself back, lifts up her skirts and reveals
her sex. The patient’s brother and his friend become very agitated,
mock the woman and make a cutting motion with their fingers, a
gesture which is aimed at letting her know that she is castrated. The
patient continues and relates a fantasy: she could pull on her husband’s
penis, and his body would empty like a balloon being emptied of its
air. It should be noted that she had always felt that her husband was the-sonof-her-mother-in-law, but not a person in his own right. It seems to
me that this example very clearly illustrates that underlying her
devaluation of the woman (myself in the transference) a very powerful
maternal imago is to be found which upsets her status by producing
other children after her and by offering them her breast (she was 18
months old when her younger brother was born, the same age as the
little boy in the dream). This mother had humiliated her as the actress
had done to her public in the day residue. Her resources for
overcoming her narcissistic wound were limited, and she chose
therefore to indicate the pitfall and failure in the maternal power, i.e.
the absence of a penis. It is the only way to triumph over the mother.
But to achieve this it is better to be equipped with a penis, like the
two young men in her dream who flout their power in the way she
could have if she had been the little 18-month-old boy in her dream.
In the fantasy that follows the dream, the patient attacks the mother’s
breast directly by emptying it, the husband’s body representing the
breast, and his penis the nipple. The husband is then like a deflated
balloon, in other words, like a limp breast. On another plane, the
husband also represents the little brother whom she castrates and destroys.
My experience with women patients has shown me that penis envy is
not an end in itself, but rather the expression of a desire to triumph over
the omnipotent primal mother through the possession of the organ the
mother lacks, i.e. the penis. Penis envy seems to be as proportionately
intense as the maternal imago is powerful.
It goes without saying that the narcissistic decathexis of the maternal
organs and qualities which then follow makes identification with the
mother and the acceptance of femininity rather difficult. Passive feminine
homosexuality is very conflictive and, because of this, integrating it is
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITY 125
very problematical. Idealization of the father and his penis perturbs the
psychosexual life of women. Athene, the daughter of Zeus, says:
There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth, and, but for the
marriage, I am always for the male side with all my heart…
We could pursue in the area of sociocultural activities the undeniable
effects of our universal need to escape our primal dependence on the
mother, but unfortunately there is no time for that here.
In spite of his views on female sexuality which reflect, in my opinion,
our fundamental conflict with the maternal object as it arises in our state
of helplessness in infancy, Freud, because he did not recognize the
determining force of the child within man, implicitly assigned to the
mother the important role that is hers. Bachofen felt that moving from a
matriarchy to a patriarchy was equivalent to the subordination of material
principles to spiritual principles, the subordination of the chthonic law of
subterranean maternal powers to celestial Olympian law. Psychoanalytic
theory does not escape this struggle between maternal and paternal law.
If we underestimate the importance of our earliest relations and our
cathexis of the maternal imago, this means we allow paternal law to
predominate and are in flight from our infantile dependence: if we
neglect the organizing effects of the Oedipus complex, which includes
the experience of whole objects, of the paternal superego, of the penis,
we restore the maternal primal power which, even if it does intimidate
us, is an undeniable source of fascination. Our personal conflicts may
cause us to forget that we are all children of Men and Women.
Notes
Presented as part of a Dialogue on ‘Freud and Female Sexuality’ at the
29th International Psycho-Analytical Congress, London, July 1975.
1 Freud’s interpretation of the fallen horse phobia leads him to the scene
where Fritzl hurts his foot and bleeds. Freud identifies the fallen horses with
Fritzl and Hans’s father. He thus arrives at the death-wish rather than the
castration-wish.
2 We know that Schreber’s (Freud 1911) mother was absorbed, so to speak,
by her husband who had usurped her maternal functions. In this case, as in
all cases of male paranoia, what is significant is the absence of a narcissistic
cathexis of femininity.
References
Aeschylus Eumenides (transl. R.Lattimore). Chicago Modern Library, 1942.
Bachofen, J.J. (1861). Das Mutterecht, 2 vols. Basle: Benno Schwabe, 1948.
126 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Braunschweig, D. and Fain, M. (1971). Eros et Anteros. Paris: Petite Bibl. Payot.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1964). The feminine guilt and the Oedipus
complex. In J.Chasseguet-Smirgel (ed.), Female Sexuality: New
Psychoanalytic Views. Ann Arbor: Michigan Univ. Press, 1970.
Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. S.E. 7.
——(1908). On the sexual theories of children. S.E. 9.
——(1909). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. S.E. 10.
——(1911). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case
of paranoia (dementia paranoides). S.E. 12.
——(1915). Instincts and their vicissitudes. S.E. 14.
——(1917). A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams. S.E. 14.
——(1918). From the history of an infantile neurosis. S.E. 17.
——(1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. S.E. 18.
——(1923). The infantile genital organization: an interpolation into the
theory of sexuality. S.E. 19.
——(1924). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. S.E. 19.
——(1925). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction
between the sexes. S.E. 19.
——(1926). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. S.E. 20.
——(1931). Female sexuality. S.E. 21.
——(1933). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis: XXXIII.
Femininity. S.E. 22.
——(1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. S.E. 23.
——(1940). An outline of psycho-analysis. S.E. 23.
——(1950). Project for a scientific psychology. S.E. 1.
Gillespie, W. (1975). Woman and her discontents. A reassessment of Freud’s
views on female sexuality. Int. Rev. Psycho-anal. 2, 1–9.
Grunberger, B. (1956). La situation analytique et le processus de guérison.
In Le Narcissisme. Paris: Payot, 1971.
——(1966). Oedipe et narcissisme. In Le Narcissisme. Paris: Payot, 1971.
Jones, E. (1933). The phallic phase. Int. J. Psycho-anal. 14, 1–33.
McDougall, J. (1972). Primal scene and sexual perversion. Int. J. PsychoAnal. 53, 371–84.
5
Concepts of vaginal orgasm
W.H.GILLESPIE
On this special occasion in the history of The International Journal of
PsychoAnalysis there are few psychoanalysts still active among us who
have been subscribers ever since Volume 1 appeared. My own regular
subscription began with Volume 13, which contained the translation of
Freud’s paper, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931).
If one takes a remote bird’s-eye view of the most obvious changes in
the climate of psychoanalytic interest and opinion that have made
themselves felt in the pages of the Journal, and elsewhere, over these 38
years, one may think perhaps of the controversy between Freud and
Jones over female psychosexual development; the full unfolding of the
Kleinian theory and its applications, with its stress on the earliest stages
and the most primitive fantasies and relationships to breast and to mother,
together with the prolonged controversy resulting therefrom; and the
development of the structural theory from the basis laid down by Freud,
a development which owes much to Anna Freud. The further extension
of ego psychology initiated by Hartmann before he left Vienna and
greatly elaborated in America by himself and others is less adequately
represented in the Journal, since much of this work was published elsewhere.
However, these main streams by no means constitute the whole of
psychoanalytic progress over the years, even if they are the most purely
psychoanalytic. Technical progress in extra-analytic fields has revealed
various facts highly relevant to psychoanalysis, though unknown at the
time of Freud’s work. I am thinking in particular of recent work on sleep
and dreaming which should take us back to reconsider The Interpretation
of Dreams and the ‘Project’ that preceded it; and I think also of the
remarkable findings resulting from Masters and Johnson’s researches into
the anatomy and physiology of the human sexual response, as well as the
detailed and complex knowledge that has been accumulating recently of
the process of sexual differentiation in the human embryo; this latter
should lead to a fuller understanding of the meaning of bisexuality than
was possible in Freud’s time.
127
128 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
The last two subjects were recently presented to psychoanalysts (not
without a certain bias, to be sure) by Mary Jane Sherfey and following
this they were discussed at length at a meeting of the American
Psychoanalytic Association, reported in its journal (1966): they were
brought especially to the attention of the British Psycho-Analytical
Society in February 1969, by Drs Rey and Pines. This is the area in
which the discoveries of Masters and Johnson most obviously call for a
reconsideration if not a revision of traditional psychoanalytic theory and
attitudes; here we have a good example of how we may profitably take
up again an issue which was debated many years ago at the highest level
in the pages of this Journal.
I wish to comment only on one limited part of Freud’s (1931) paper,
‘Female Sexuality’, the part to which Masters and Johnson’s work is
particularly relevant; the latter provides certain hitherto unknown facts
which may possibly call for some modifications in Freud’s formulations
concerning female libidinal development. I refer to Freud’s view that the
female must not only change the sex of her love object, but must also
overcome an initial phallic stage of development in which the leading
erotogenic zone is the clitoris and the aim an active one directed towards
the mother in the first instance; she must, said Freud, substitute the
vagina for the clitoris as the leading zone, and must accept a passive aim
in place of her original active one. This can be accomplished successfully
in such a way as to produce a truly mature woman only if she can
succceed in overcoming the very strong earlier attachment to the clitoral1
zone with its active aim, a task which many women fail to accomplish
satisfactorily.
This view of the relation between clitoris and vagina and of the
difficult task of making the transfer had been reached by Freud at least as
early as 1897, when he wrote about it to Fliess (Freud 1950), bringing it
into relation with the abandonment of other, earlier, sexual zones, i.e.
pregenital ones. Even more relevant is a passage in ‘Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality’ (Freud 1905). After speaking of ‘pubertal repression’
in women Freud writes:
When at last the sex act is permitted and the clitoris itself becomes
excited, it still retains a function: the task, namely of transmitting the
excitation to the adjacent female sexual parts, just as—to use a simile—
pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire.
The following passage (especially when one recalls subsequent
formulations) seems to indicate that this piece of insight, with its
remarkable foreshadowing of the findings of Masters and Johnson,
quickly became converted for Freud into the idea that the ‘transfer of
CONCEPTS OF VAGINAL ORGASM 129
excitation’ from clitoris to vagina implied a developmental process in
which the clitoris should normally give up its excitability in favour of the
vagina, and that its failure to do so in less normal cases is associated with
anaesthesia of ‘the vaginal orifice’.
One of the outstanding features of Masters and Johnson’s researches is
that they have literally thrown light in dark places, namely on the
processes that occur in the female genitalia during sexual activity, using
colour cinematography with the help of special apparatus. For my present
purpose I will pick out only one or two of their findings; my references
will be to Sherfey’s (1966) paper and its quotations, since this may be
more accessible than the Masters and Johnson monograph (1965).
First, then, Masters and Johnson state (Sherfey 1966:66):
From an anatomic point of view, there is absolutely no difference in
the response of the pelvic viscera to effective sexual stimulation,
regardless of whether stimulation occurs as a result of clitoral area
manipulation, natural or artificial coition, or, for that matter from
breast stimulation alone… The female’s physiologic responses to
effective sexual stimulation…develop with consistency regardless of
the source of the psychic or physical sexual stimulation.
It should be carefully noted, of course, that it does not follow from this
that the psychological response is necessarily uniform.
Secondly, as regards orgasm, Masters states (Sherfey, p. 69):
the female responds to sexual stimulation…in a manner essentially akin
to the localized congestive reaction which accompanies erection in the
male penis…[And] actual orgasmic experiences are initiated in both
sexes by similar muscle components.
Finally, let us look at the role of the clitoris as elucidated by Masters and
Johnson. As Sherfey remarks (p. 74):
One of the most significant findings of Masters and Johnson is the fact
that the clitoral glans is kept in a state of continuous stimulation
throughout intra-vaginal coition even though it is not being touched
and appears to have vanished
owing to erection and retraction into the swollen prepuce. Masters and
Johnson state (Sherfey, p. 74):
A mechanical traction develops on both sides of the clitoral hood
subsequent to penile distension of the vaginal outlet. With penile
130 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
thrusts, the entire clitoral body is pulled towards the pudendum by
traction exerted on the wings of the minor labial hood.
When the penile shaft is withdrawn during active coition, traction
on the clitoral hood is somewhat relieved and the body and glans
return to the normal pudendal overhang positioning…. This rhythmic
movement of the clitoral body in conjunction with intravaginal
thrusting and withdrawl of the penis develops significant secondary
tension levels. It should be emphasized that this same type of
secondary clitoral stimulation occurs in every coital position, when
there is full penetration of the vaginal barrel by the erect penis.
Sherfey goes on (p. 78):
Furthermore, it is also obvious why the thrusting movements of the
penis will necessarily create simultaneous stimulation of the lower
third of the vagina, labia minora, and clitoral shaft and glans as an
integrated, inseparable functioning unit with the glans being the most
important and, in by far the majority of instances, the indispensable
initiator of the orgasmic reaction. With these observations, the
evidence seems overwhelming: it is a physical impossibility to separate the
clitoral from the vaginal orgasm as demanded by psychoanalytic theory.
Now if we accept these findings and statements, what becomes of the
supposed distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasm, and the value
judgement which sets so many sophisticated Western women in pursuit
of the elusive ‘vaginal orgasm’? It seems probable that we must agree that
an orgasm is an orgasm, and that one differs from another not in kind but
in degree or completeness, or in the emotional satisfaction that
accompanies it.
I wish to propose that in future if and when the term ‘vaginal orgasm’
is used we should no longer think of that as something excluding an
outgrown clitoral erotogenicity; the term should instead be used
exclusively to denote an orgasm that is brought about by thrusting
movements in the vaginal barrel, whether or not such movements are
indirectly producing excitation of the clitoris. The term ‘clitoral orgasm’
would then denote orgasm produced by local stimulation in the vicinity of the
clitoris, not by thrusting movements in the vagina.
Having in this way eliminated the probably misleading idea that female
maturity necessitates an outgrowing or ‘repression’ (to use Freud’s early
description) of clitoral erotogenicity, we can proceed to consider what
obstacles actually stand in the way of vaginal orgasms as defined above;
and here we shall find ourselves on familiar psychoanalytic ground and
shall be concerned with many psychological problems, such as fear of
CONCEPTS OF VAGINAL ORGASM 131
penetration or invasion, problems of penis envy, masculine identification,
and countless others. But one bogey will be out of the way, and I believe
this will be a real advance in the psychoanalytic understanding of female
sexuality.
I should like to suggest further that, in view of what we have learned
from Masters and Johnson, we should reconsider very carefully the
question whether clitoral excitation is necessarily associated with the urge
to penetrate and act the male; may not clitoral excitation on the contrary
lead to the wish to be penetrated in order to satisfy its proper erotic aim in
the physiological manner that has been described? In the former case,
penis envy indeed seems an inevitable and therefore normal consequence
of anatomy; but in the latter case penis desire, i.e. the desire to be
penetrated and so stimulated both vaginally and clitorally, is the outcome
to be expected in a normal female psychosexual development.
Finally, it should be said that an incomparably fuller discussion of the
problems of female sexuality is to be found in the Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association of July 1968. In particular, the semantic
ambiguities in current uses of the term ‘vaginal orgasm’ are considered in
great detail in an admirable paper by Glenn and Kaplan. My excuse for
the present publication is that there may be an advantage in picking out
one particular theme for discussion from among the very complex issues
that face us in the study of female sexuality, if in this way one particular
tree may be clearly visualized and distinguished from the wood. I make
no apology for the symbolism.
Note
1 I am aware that the correct form is ‘clitoridal’, but this is so clumsy and
unpronounceable that I prefer to be incorrect.
References
Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. S.E. 7.
——(1931). Female sexuality. S.E. 21.
——(1950). Extracts from the Fliess papers: Letter 75. S.E. 1.
Glenn, J. and Kaplan, E.H. (1968). Types of orgasm in women: a critical
review and redefinition. J. Am. Psychoanal. Ass. 16, 549–564.
Masters, W.H. and Johnson, V.E. (1965). Human Sexual Response. Boston,
Mass.: Little, Brown; London: Churchill, 1966.
Sherfey, M.J. (1966). The evolution and nature of female sexuality in
relation to psychoanalytic theory. J. Am. Psychoanal. Ass. 14, 28–128.
6
The phallic shadow
DENISE BRAUNSCHWEIG and MICHEL FAIN
Going through the writings which compare the sexual maturation of the
little girl and the little boy, you find that in spite of the divergences
which separate them, there is often a shared error which brings them
together. A confusion appears between the penis as object of phallic
narcissism and the penis as instrument of Eros. This confusion leads to
the idea that the boy, possessor of the penis, is more capable of
integrating his drives than the girl. Now narcissism and eroticism don’t
get on well together, as we will often have occasion to recall. There is an
ordinary expression which signifies this: ‘sexual impotence’. Potency is a
narcissistic quality. The fact is that the impotent man thinks of his sexual
activity as a form of potency, and this, moreover, is why he is not
impotent, but inhibited in his erotic capacity. And it is the narcissistic
investment, fixated onto this instrument which he fears losing if he uses
it, which leads to this state. Phallic narcissism, a direct consequence of the
castration complex, constitutes for the man a way of emerging from the
Oedipal conflict. If the superego is the inheritor of the Oedipus complex,
then phallic narcissism is an inheritance which comes from the father,
and to a certain extent, like any inheritance, it consecrates the father.
This inheritance contains in particular the reality principle. So the boy
who has developed in normality-inducing conditions treats the core of
anxiety hysteria that he experiences at the moment of his Oedipal
conflict in a way that ensures its repression and thus issues in a phallic
narcissism pregnant with an ego ideal based on the reality principle. Our
reason for having just given this explanation is above all to make it clear
that this course of development determines a libidinal economy which is
different according to sex, and we insist on the term ‘different’, for the
affirmation that the penis, by its very existence, ensures a better
integration of the drives is a judgement which shows that the reality
defined by phallic narcissism is not always the truth. Rather, the presence
of the penis as a perception experienced via the parents sets going a series
of reactions which are of primordial importance in the determinism of
132
THE PHALLIC SHADOW 133
sexual identity. So we can expect that the difference of the sexes will be
pregnant with a different libidinal economy, and that the absence of a
visible penis in the girl entails for her a set of responses which will make
her adopt an economic system that cannot be superimposed on the boy’s.
Our point of view already allows us to sense in advance that the famous
masculine protest has to do with this mode of distribution of the libidinal
economy.
In the outcome of her Oedipal conflict, the little girl cannot therefore
treat her core of anxiety hysteria in the same way as the little boy.
Moreover, it is usual to agree that the outcome of the Oedipal conflict is
less clear-cut with the girl. That amounts to saying that the core of
anxiety hysteria is going to persist and lead to a series of manifestations
which, further, will be able to undergo a regression to the level of the
anal stage, whether in part or completely. On the other hand, the
constitution of her superego, less assured than that of the boy, includes a
paternal origin which the girl has every interest in maintaining, for it
constitutes, right inside her personality, the transgression which is just
what this presence should avoid. This transgression occurs in a displaced
mode, through an attitude of masochistic provocation on the part of the
ego in relation to the superego, a provocation which is usually at the root
of the tendency to failure. The direct consequence of these differences is
translated by the fact that the reality principle does not succeed in
ensuring a complete primacy for itself, that a significant quantity of objectlibido is not transformed into narcissistic libido and remains free, and
comes to reinforce the pleasure principle as a result.
The pleasure principle, when it is dominant, in no way constitutes a
capacity for eroticism. It simply marks a tendency to discharge excess
libido so as to return as quickly as possible to the optimum level.
Whatever the conceptions that have been developed by psychoanalysts,
the fact is that girls only belatedly become conscious of their vaginas, and
that, as a result of this fact, sexual desire for them is elaborated in such a
complex way that it becomes extremely fragile. The fact of the nonrecognition of the vagina as an erogenous zone during childhood is so
well established, and thus so much follows an implicitly defined
organization, that we are obliged to characterize as ‘abnormal’ the cases
observed from time to time in clinical practice of ‘premature’ recognition
of the vagina as an erogenous zone. It is a matter of a real syndrome
appearing in a family constellation containing certain specific elements,
while it is possible to observe some differences on the basis of these
common elements. The reason why we consider it necessary to discuss
this here now is above all to see what differences this premature
recognition of the vagina entails in these women’s development, in
comparison with the most usual form of development. So what we have
134 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
is a family marked by the following characteristics: the girl is the elder
sister of a brother, who is the chosen object of the mother, with whom
he lives in a state of continuing symbiosis. The sister is only considered
interesting by the mother to the extent that she helps in maintaining this
symbiosis, a fate which she shares with her father. It is in the girl’s
reactive attitude in relation to the mother-son couple and the possibilities
this situation offers her for getting close to her father, the acceptance or
rejection of these possibilities, that the differences in each case are
constituted. But however this may be, the dominant elements of such a
constellation come down to these facts: first, the mother-son couple
constitutes a unity in which narcissistic and erotic tendencies are satisfied,
tendencies which do not go by way of the mother’s vagina and do not,
for this reason, confer a primacy on the mother’s genital organs.
Secondly, faced with this couple, another is set up, the father and the
daughter, a fact which in no way bothers the mother. The fatherdaughter couple is a miserable get-together, sanctioning the paternal
downfall and his inability to imprint his law on the family. To sum up,
we could say that the mother’s indifference to her daughter’s sexual
development, an indifference that has been manifest ever since her birth,
and the father’s inability to ensure his power, seem to play an important
part in this premature recognition of the vagina as an erogenous zone. In
fact, it is not possible for us to respond with certainty to the question
which then emerges: would it not be the maintenance of vaginal sexual
pleasure as a conscious memory which would be unusual?—a pleasure
which begins around the age of three, perhaps even before, goes through
the whole latency period without modification and is maintained after
puberty. Wouldn’t there always be a recognition of the vagina which
would subsequently be repressed? We will discuss this important question
later on, our aim for the moment being to grasp what usually happens,
on the basis of these ‘irregular’ cases. The little girl here is leading a triple
life. In the first place, she is the servant of the mother-son couple and so
her attitude seeks to show honour to the son. In the second place, she is
the love object of the excluded father and in a dim way she perceives his
desire. Finally, she has her secret life, in the course of which, through
fantasies, generally sado-masochistic ones, she experiences authentic
vaginal orgasms. These fantasies are not accompanied by masturbation,
which is to say by the use of the hands. (In general, but not always, the
legs are crossed and squeeze the sex tightly.) Always, in these fantasies,
neither the man’s penis, nor penetration, is evoked. However, these
fantasies contain the representation of a strong character who has been
able to bring the mother into line. So these little girls really do have a
double life, each split off from the other. On the one hand, they are the
priestesses of the cult of the little brother, and in addition the consoler,
THE PHALLIC SHADOW 135
and even more the fellow sufferer of the father—here it is a matter of
their official life—and on the other, they have an intense fantasy life
accompanied by numerous orgasms. When they become adult, they
experience considerable sexual difficulties, since they do not manage to
reunite their two ways of life. But then we find that a whole section of
their development has remained in an embryonic state. They are not
aware of the possibilities for seduction that they could exercise in
utilizing their wiles, whether these methods are physical or intellectual.
In place of the development of their desires for seduction, identifications
with the mother are substituted, which are meant to please the brother.
Their elegance is subject to the principle of not making the brother
ashamed. So this fantasy life with intense vaginal orgasms seems to have
taken the place of what for other women ends up with an interest in the
possibilities for seduction offered by their own bodies. In some way, the
preparation for masculine desire seems in these cases not to have been
elaborated. It is true that these little girls have only got close to the father
in so far as he is neglected, and that nothing was turning them in the
direction of seduction. Through these examples of premature recognition
of the vagina as an erogenous zone, we are led to think that, without a
penis, girls are led to cathect their own bodies—not, as in the cases cited,
the vagina. But we think it is not possible to compare, or to establish an
equivalence between the narcissistic investment that the little boy
performs on his penis, and the girl’s cathexis of her body. She invests in
it, at least in part, in the manner of an object of love, with an objectlibido which for this reason does not undergo the same narcissistic
transformation. So what we have is a movement which includes a large
element of auto-eroticism. The little girl likes to make herself pretty. So
this auto-eroticism comes to compensate for what she experiences as a
narcissistic wound. It is no less certain that this auto-eroticism
undoubtedly takes on a meaning with an anal origin. The notions of
‘dirty’ and ‘ugly’ are there in the background. It is interesting to note that
the epithets ‘dirty’ and ‘ugly’ are used to designate the little girl who has
stolen her mother’s make-up and then devoted her adorable little face to
some expert cosmetic operations. So feminine coquettishness includes the
relatively late integration of an anal element. This element is allowed
from a certain age onwards, and in particular after the loss of virginity.
In any case, this integration shows a different utilization of anality from
the boy’s, which is one of the arguments tending to place in doubt the
idea of a shared and identical stem in the development of boys and girls.
Here too, the latency period is instructive for us. The resurgence of
anality promoted by the Oedipal failure will in both sexes take routes
whose apparent divergences only serves to underline their
complementarity. It is not a divergence but already a tendency to intersection.
136 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
As we discussed earlier on [referring to an earlier chapter not included here
—Editor’s note], the group of little latent males is marked by the
dominance of the active ego ideal, contemporary with the anal period,
over the passive ego ideal, more primal, marked by the omnipotence of
passivity, which has raised itself up in the wake of the failure of the
immediate satisfaction of desires and of their hallucinatory realization.
Oedipal failure, followed by the introjection of the superego, would tend
to bring about a massive displacement of the penis libido in the direction
of the anus, and cause pleasure to be sought in anal passivity in relation to
the father. Narcissistic investment of the penis is generally opposed to
such a step, and reacts by mobilizing the anal ego ideal, advocating active
domination and mastery. For the little girl, the same step results in an
apparent submission, not to the paternal penis, but to the delegated
power which it confers on the mother in the imposition of the reactive
forms. If these are going to serve in part to build up the coquettishness
we spoke of above, and all the more during the latency period because
maternal authority is experienced as subordinated to the father and ‘dirty’
anality is now abandoned to obtain his love, it is none the less the case
that the little girl’s ‘cleanliness’ instantly demands to be dirtied by the
little boy, and this cleanliness represents a first draft of a sexual and
receptive organ in relation to the future partner of adulthood. This
cleanliness thus already appears as something very different in nature from
the kind of reaction formation that could appear in another little girl
showing a significant regression promoted by an anal fixation.
The process of integration which concludes with the transformation of
anal drives into coquettishness comes to be added, without conflict, to
this appearance of reaction formations. Faecal matter on view conserves a
vivid attractive power leading to the definite feeling of disgust. This
feeling translated the immediate introjection into the psychic apparatus of
the fantasies represented by faecal matter and the immediate attempt at
rejection which it brings with it. The whole art of make-up consists in
recovering this attractive power of faecal matter—a power which even
has a penetrative aspect—while suppressing the reactions of repulsiveness
which usually follow this initial moment of attraction. And an overdone
use of cosmetics goes back to this repellent anal quality. This integration
of anality is not only translated by make-up, which is only its most visible
aspect, but also by a whole mode of behaviour, including in particular a
certain way of carrying the body—to give it an image, let us call it a
certain ‘rough’ look which must not, any more than the make-up,
exceed a certain limit. If the little girl represses this type of anal
integration and principally cathects the ‘little boy’ mode which, although
it is there in normal cases, is dominated by the first one, then she
becomes frankly repulsive. Her anality takes on the value of a symbol of
THE PHALLIC SHADOW 137
destructive power stuck to her, which does not make her only a phallic
woman, but also the representation of a primal scene during which
anality becomes representative of the father’s threat of castration. A man’s
reaction when faced with a woman presenting anal traits that are not
concealed follows the reactivation of the memory-traces linked to the
primal scene and to the anal type of aggressions which it arouses.
In her study of female homosexuality, Joyce McDougall has ably
demonstrated how the mothers of homosexual women, because of a
significant anal fixation, hinder the development which goes from
reaction formations to coquettishness. A division is produced between
the hated ‘clean’ mother and the coquettish, feminine woman who
becomes the erotic object, the father remaining the repulsive object onto
whom all anality is projected. We would like to add a complementary
detail to this remarkable description: the father in such a case receives the
anal charge which is usually invested in the little boy. This fact allows us
to understand that the idealization of the paternal penis benefits from the
anal charge which is normally invested in the boy, for if you say
idealization you say defaecalization.
Having said this, we think, along with Joyce McDougall, that a little
girl has more need to be loved by her mother in the course of her
excremental activity than the little boy. Passive pleasure linked to a
valorized anality tends to maintain the dominance over active anal
omnipotence of the ego ideal centred on the passive omnipotence lost in
the past. So the desire to receive remains in the foreground.
B.Lewin has published an article in which he discusses a fantasy found
in a number of patients, during which the woman thinks she is smearing
herself with faecal matter. The associative chain which brings on this
fantasy starts with the idea of menstruation experienced as a form of anal
incontinence. Lewin thinks that this fantasy of anal incontinence is a
reassurance that is both narcissistic and auto-erotic, against the resurgence
of the impression of castration linked to periods. It represents a desire to
extend the erogeneity of the mucous membrane of the anus to the entire
skin surface, a fantasy activated by the acceptance of castration.
Lewin’s point of view confirms ours on two points. First, the pleasure
derived from beautifying her own image because of the impossibility of
transforming object libido into narcissistic libido centred on the penis,
like the little boy, can be regressively doubled by the erotic pleasure,
through extending anal sensibility to the entire skin of the body, of
dirtying herself with faecal matter—which, so the little girl thinks, could
make her into the ‘dirty’ little boy.
Secondly, after the displacement of all the anal charge on to periods, makeup, creams and the slightly ‘rough’ bearing, all accentuate the sexual
attraction. It is not only a question of identification with an attractive
138 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
woman, but also of the result of a whole relationship to the body,
charged with erotic pleasure. It is probable that impure periods,
following the Bible, concentrate the whole faecal aspect onto themselves,
whereas makeup preserves the initial attractive power of faecal matter.
At any rate, the fantasy described by Lewin emphasizes a distinctive
aspect of the renewal of anal omnipotence, without there being a
decathexis of passivity and of the pleasure of the anal mucous membrane
extended to the skin. We think that this aspect, typically feminine, only
exercises a dominant action over a completely different aspect, nearer to
the little boy, an aspect in which the active anal ego ideal also reappears
so as to bandage up the wounds linked to the Oedipal failure.
The entire preceding description looks as though it is taking no
account of the classical displacement of penis envy onto the desire to
have a child. This is not entirely true. The auto-erotic cathexis of the
body seems to us a more logical sequel not just to the acceptance of the
visible lack of a penis, but above all to the set of environmental responses
entailed by the fact of being one of the female sex. This way of looking
at things remains in the general line of thinking which would say that to
any narcissistic wound there corresponds a tendency to auto-erotic
activity. The desire to have a child, which, as Melanie Klein stressed,
certainly has a very deep origin, is at the same time the desire which the
little girl can officially declare. So this desire, on the one hand an innate
one, is on the other hand put forward as a reparation, although this does
not happen without the maternal state which it implies at the same time
reflecting a pressure to reduce specifically feminine sexual desires. This
seems to us sufficiently complex to require postponing its discussion until later.
We are aware that while for any psychoanalyst, and even for a high
proportion of educated people, it can be acknowledged that what is
considered feminine narcissism is the counterpart of a basic narcissistic
deficiency, on the other hand to assert that this same deficiency, linked to
the absence of a penis, would make it possible to develop a greater
capacity for erotic pleasure can appear as a real scandal, renewing the
shock produced by Tiresias. These are not things that should be said—
but are they true? The narcissism-eroticism opposition does not seem to
us any less reliable than the observations that have been presented. It is
certainly valid to make the objection that in less unusual cases, the
identifications with the protagonists of the primal scene in the inverted
Oedipal positions cast a different light on things. And it is also true that
in the little girl’s and even the woman’s conscious—or easily made conscious
—experience, she, just like Freud and all who have followed him in this
line, believes that her sexual organs are not worth as much as the boy’s in
terms of their resources for pleasure. Wouldn’t there rather be a
reciprocal overestimation of the erotic possibilities of the other sex, with
THE PHALLIC SHADOW 139
this counter-invested for the boy by the narcissistic cathexis of the penis,
and generally remaining completely unconscious? Such an over-valuation
might be at the root of the myth of the androgyne in Plato’s Symposium,
taken up by Freud in a different context (Beyond the Pleasure Principle): the
desire to possess the sex that one does not have, and to which are
consequently attributed exceptional qualities, without losing the one that
is naturally one’s own, especially if one is a boy. Freud also described the
overestimation of the love object as being characteristic of the state of
being in love in men; so might not the unconscious projection of
superior erotic capacities onto the woman be part of the nature of erotic
attraction? The women we have discussed, and who had a premature
awareness of their vaginas, do not develop a real bodily narcissism and
did not go through penis envy which opens up for seductiveness the
desire to be desired. Maria Torok has told us about penis envy, its
unfortunate consequences for feminine sexuality, and its unconscious
defensive significance in the relationship to the anal and Oedipal mother;
a desire can be satisfied, she says, but never an envy; penis envy signs the
girl’s renunciation of the autonomous possession of her body and
jouissance by means of the penis; but this envy encounters a complicity in
the other sex, where envy for the vagina has to remain unconscious not
just because of the fears of castration it would engender, but also because
this envy, in the Kleinian sense, is addressed to the mother, who in the
unconscious, as much for boys as for girls, still commands all the
capacities for pleasure and creativity in her primary omnipotence. When
we get to this point we can see that we have made almost no progress by
making the objections that could be offered against us to ourselves.
Another angle then appears: the wish often expressed in child
psychotherapies through the associative material to see the difference of
the sexes suppressed. This wish in fact appears to be highly complex. It
emanates from an ego already provided with an organization reflecting
the opposition brought out by Freud in an initial formulation, between
ego instincts and sexual instincts. Generally speaking, the perceptionconsciousness system is maintained in a state of underdevelopment in
sexual matters. The understanding to which it is entitled concerning the
relationships which govern family life does in fact follow the line of the
wish expressed. The child is not deemed to know about his parents’
sexual life, any more than they are deemed to be authorized to know
about the child’s sexual life. This is why the repression of infantile
masturbation (we are not talking here about adolescent masturbation)
takes on such a tragic quality. What we have is a repression which does
not know what it is repressing. It is not a simple ban, but a prohibition
issued by the parents’ superego against perceiving what is going on with
the child. This is also why the masturbation which is officially accepted
140 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
because of the erroneous principles of sex education, but denied at the
level of its Oedipal significance, in the last analysis undergoes the same
repression. At several points, Freud mentions that the infantile
masturbation that takes place at the time of the Oedipal conflict
frequently leads to real castration threats on the part of the adults. In fact,
these threats are rare, and even when they are made it is probable that
they are not taken seriously. We think that in this area Freud believed, as
he did with hysteria, in the reality of the threat which is thereby situated
at the level of the perception-consciousness system, whereas in fact it is a
question of an unconscious construction. It is the parents’ anxious
reaction, an anxiety in the face of their superego, which does not accept
their access to the meaning of the young child’s masturbation, which
gives a very great force to the castration threat which gets associated with
infantile masturbation. The quasi-universal belief in this threat can only
take on its strength, which is not altered by surface reassurances, through
an instinctual manifestation which is blind to all reasoning. Now as Freud
stressed over and over again, the superego derives its huge force from the
id. The threat in question is as incapable of being altered by reasoning as
a fully constituted phobia. This is why the reality principle as a group
phenomenon contains a shared negation of the castration threat—a
negation which derives its strength in the dynamics of a crowd, and one
which gives way if the bonds constituting the group are dissolved.
We are thus led to think that the wish that there be no sexual
relationship between the parents—in other words, that it should not be
possible to call up a representation of the primal scene—has something to
do with the repression by the parental superego of infantile masturbation.
We should recall that infantile masturbation is developed in an initial
period as a defence against the primal scene. Actually, the primal scene
provokes two contradictory experiences, on the one hand an onrush of
stimulations, and on the other a feeling of exclusion. Masturbation
through a concentration on the pleasure accompanied by fantasies enables
the afflux of excitation to be isolated, at the same time as it creates a very
rich internal narrative. But the parental reaction breaks in on the distance
which had been created in this way, all the more forcefully in that it is a
mirror image: the very small child’s masturbation tends to make them
conscious of just what the child was running away from in its
masturbatory activity.
This leads us to a second point: is the transgression, in so far as it can
be conceived of by the young spectator of the narcissistic unity formed
by the mother and her newborn baby, beyond sex, as one could think it
might be? To the older child, the baby appears to be libidinally endowed
with economic possiblities which she or he no longer has: it sucks its
mother’s breasts, defaecates and urinates in its nappies; its whole body
THE PHALLIC SHADOW 141
and all its functions seem to have become the object of the mother’s
special attention. So there is a lack of harmony between the older one’s
instrumental capacities, which are well developed, assuring him of an
obvious superiority which makes him an older one, whereas in libidinal
terms he feels very inferior to the newborn child. From this point there is
only one step to believing throughout his life that the young will always
be better provided for than him, and it is rapidly made. We can say that
in the elder one’s eyes, even if he considers that he has a bigger penis
than the new baby, it is also a repressed penis, whereas the baby has
methods at its disposal that he can no longer command. It is a matter of a
transgression which is perhaps beyond sex, but not a transgression of the
sexual in the wide sense of the term.
The little girl who is the spectator of the same scene certainly relives
an identical conflict. All her desire to possess her mother, her lack of a
penis to do this, can be strongly reactivated. She can find compensations
because of the mother’s being partially on leave as the father’s wife, and
the counter-Oedipal position of the father which is often reinforced in
such circumstances. But the little girl also has another compensation: she
becomes conscious of the importance conferred on the woman’s body by
motherhood. This attenuates her narcissistic wound linked to the lack of
a penis, even though it also reactivates her double Oedipal conflict.
While in one way this valorization of the woman’s body helps the girl to
effect her change of object by making her desire a child from her father,
just at this point when he is more available, in another it also reactivates
the more primitive form centred on the desire to seize the paternal penis,
a partial object, which at this point is confused with the mother’s baby.
The small boy cathects his penis with all his narcissism and so makes out
of an old instrument of pleasure, now greatly devalued in itself, the
representative of a shared cult. The small girl gets into playing with dolls,
and often devotes to her doll a genuine love, whereas the little boy
displaces the cult devoted to the penis onto substitute representations
which will form the basis of the ego ideal modified by the Oedipal
conflict. Here we reach a paradoxical conclusion, opposed to the general
view: the ‘transgression beyond sex’ of the new baby, a transgression
which puts in question the apparent superiority of the elder male child
and confirms him in his phallic narcissism, seems in contrast to bring the
little girl a reparation for a more ancient narcissistic wound and open the
way to love for her. This is why women are mature more quickly than
men, even though they do not seek to achieve as much as them.
The universal need, which is narcissistic in essence, to project the
phallic shadow onto the female genital organs, correspondingly
diminishes their original capacity for being able to give pleasure. It is
because of this need that in some African tribes, little girls are made to
142 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
undergo various manipulations very early on which are meant to enlarge
the shaft of the clitoris. Completely opposite in appearance, this practice
is related to the excision practised in other tribes.
Masters and Johnson made a study of ‘sexual response’ which is
curious in a number of ways. We can follow their conclusions only with
a certain degree of reluctance, given the experimental methods used.
However, they have the merit of showing in their way the extent to
which this projection of the phallic shadow entailed a misrecognition of
female sexual pleasure. We know that some surgeons have gone so far as
to lower the position of the clitoris, thinking that frigidity is due to the
impossibility of contact with the penis during intercourse. Doctors have
injected cortico-suprarenal extracts ‘to increase the size and sensitiveness
of the clitoris’. In fact, these practices mask with the jargon of rationality
the same fantasy as the one operating in the African tribes cited above.
To put it in more ordinary terms, the majority of men (and many
women too) imagine that in sexual relations, the clitoris follows a course
which can be superimposed onto that of the penis. In fact, what happens
is the opposite: the clitoris, which is swollen at the start of sexual
excitation, is completely retracted at the moment of orgasm; and on the
other hand it tends to become tumescent again, and even painful, if
orgasm has not been reached. In fact, the clitoris is a unique organ of its
kind, it has a purely erotic function and plays a prominent role because of
its very rich supply of nerves in the perception of sexual excitement. In
the adult woman, it opens the way to the desire for vaginal penetration.
A sensitive organ, it does not particularly call forth a desire for direct
contact, provoking too sharp an excitation, but plays an important role in
the pleasure linked to the excitation of the surrounding erogenous zones,
the mons Veneris, the labia minora, in this way contributing to the
general erotogeneity of the female genital organs.
Attention has been drawn to the importance acquired by urethral
excitation in the little girl. A fixation of this kind is to a large extent
derived from the shadow of the penis, an organ which condenses both
sexual and urinary functions. But the clitoris has no connection with the
female urethra and no need of it.
In fact, female genital activity develops naturally towards a whole
starting from organs which are apparently separate whose function in no
way corresponds to that of the penis. This apparent separation entails
psychological reactions centred on the notion of castration, for the man
as well as the woman, reactions which contribute to a disturbance in the
woman’s sexuality. The penis, a visible unity, grouping together genital
and urethral eroticism, leads to the notion of synthesis, whereas female
functional unity is perceived as fragmented.
THE PHALLIC SHADOW 143
A commonplace fantasy concerning anal eroticism reinforces this error:
for the male, the anus is fantasmatically in direct communication with the
penis and the aim of the fantasies of incorporating the paternal penis is to
make the child grow a big penis. It is not impossible, as René Diatkine
has observed, that the origin of this kind of fantasy is to be found in
erections accompanying the pleasure of defaecation.
The clitoris, in contrast, is not included in a similar fantasy—and if it
is, this occurs in a mode of reinforced masculine protest, with nothing to
grip onto, which tends to separate it from its function of integrating into
an ensemble. A fantasy identical to the boy’s tries, without succeeding in
this, to re-create a feeling of unity which, because it is modelled on that
of the boy, risks destroying the female functional unity.
It does not escape us that these considerations describe the active
phallic phase, common to both girls and boys, in another light, or at least
that they incline us towards thinking that it is more a tradition that has
created it in the girl, and not a natural movement. To put this another
way, the projection of the phallic phase onto the little girl would come
from a general way of thinking and in short would be identical in its
origin to the manipulations which little girls are made to undergo in
some African tribes. If this explanation seems to distance us from the
classical opinion developed by Freud and brings us close to that of
Melanie Klein, at the same time it is not so far from the Freudian
hypothesis about fetishism. Human beings of both sexes give the female
genital organs a simultaneous double meaning and in this way integrate a
false conception of the clitoris, a true generalized fetishism and one that
because of this forms part of a general way of thinking.
The notion of fetishism leads to the discussion of the concept of
reality, limiting this of course to our subject. Reality is a provisional
notion defined by a given group. The way in which this notion is
constructed for each individual to the point of becoming an integral part
of an ego-function is a long story which is not our concern here. We
will limit ourselves to the question concerning the castration threat. This
is experienced by the group as an absolute reality, secondarily denied.
This secondary denial is in no way a rectification, but a collective
rejection. The neurotic who acts and thinks without being able to
maintain this negation is very badly thought of for this reason. Our
project is to show that the influence of this denied reality, a reality which
is not a truth, has contributed to warping the understanding of what
female sexuality is. The little boy’s ‘No, such a thing does not exist’
when he perceives the absence of a penis in the little girl, is an echo of
the general negation of the group. The little girl can only register this
vast echo which ‘does not want to know’, and for this reason transforms
her sex not into lack, but into a general misrecognition. Her clitoris, on
144 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
the other hand, receives an accentuated recognition to the detriment of
the vagina. From this point, a woman must wait for a partner of one or
other sex to come and reveal to her a truth that is not a reality. The
reality of the group derived from the law of the father first of all denies
the existence of the female sex, a representation of castration, and
valorizes the clitoris in a fetishistic mode, thus erroneously detaching it
from the vagina, and then simultaneously recognizes the existence of the
female sex in a way which ultimately remains impregnated with the
initial mistake.
We can then wonder whether a basic error of this kind has not shaped
an aspect of the female character: women, when it comes down to it, are
not particularly interested in reality, and are completely contemptuous of
masculine logic. They know that their truth makes them escape from the
reality of the group dominated by the law of the father. It is therefore not
surprising that Melanie Klein pronounced some first truths about female
sexuality, and on that basis some theories that were incisive because they
were unconcerned with a masculine reality that she did not recognize. It
seems to us that what Maria Torok describes in relation to penis envy is
close to our opinion: in order to come to terms with the group error
erected into reality, the woman is obliged to find a substitute to ensure
the counter-investment of her true desire: she says she desires the fetish
when in fact she is seeking the functional unity which is her sex and
which is presented to her as a truncated, fragmented and non-existent
grouping.
If we now go back to those little girls we discussed above and who,
following a certain type of conflict linked to unusual circumstances,
brought about a premature recognition of the vagina as an organism
playing a part in female eroticism, we could say that in discovering this
truth they were turning away from reality and behaving as psychotics.
Indeed, it was stressed at the same time that this premature recognition
occurred within a constellation where the law of the son, the maternal
penis, was more powerful than the law of the father.
We also rediscover another point of view developed at the beginning
and concerning the difference of the sexes: whereas the little boy’s
narcissistic valorization of the penis, a valorization occurring to the
detriment of the pleasure that the genital organization can procure, is
included in the reality principle, the existence of an integrated female
sexuality whose basic elements all exist early on is part of a specifically
feminine pleasure principle. This is why the Freudian and Kleinian
conceptions about female sexuality are not opposed but coexist. The
attempt, which has often been made to integrate them with each other
proceeds from the same movement as the construction of a symptom, for
their coexistence is normally conflictual. Melanie Klein, moreover, brings
THE PHALLIC SHADOW 145
out the tight connection that exists early on between female sexuality and
the desire to have children. In this we once more come across an
element which has been amply developed in relation to men’s sexuality:
the antagonism between the narcissistic valorization of the penis (which
because of this becomes a phallus unfit for pleasure) and the maternal instinct.
The woman thus lives two Oedipal conflicts, one proceeding from a quasibiological law inscribed in the destiny of being a mother, and which
would tend to minimize the role of the man—the angle defended by
Melanie Klein—and another conflict marked by the law of the father
which contains in itself the simultaneous negation and affirmation of
female sexuality, the separate valorization of the clitoris and the
subordination of maternity to paternity.
This conception makes possible a better understanding of the deep
roots of the virulent aggressiveness of what are called masculine women
in relation to men. The virile woman valorizes the existence of an
illusory phallus that she knows is illusory. This constrains her into
demanding from others that they recognize the existence of what does
not exist. Men only recognize in them a fetish, and definitely not a
phallus. From this arises the protest demanding that the invisible be
perceived in her. Women like this who have suffered from the ritual
negation of their own sex, placed in a repetition compulsion, demand
that the man accords them recognition of a sex which, in their personal
lives, has already caused their own to disappear. The demand for
inclusion of their own sex in the reality of the group is displaced onto the
demand that they are given the recognition for a phallus: you might as
well try to fill the barrel of the Danaïdes, the female murderers of the
father. So women like this have structured themselves solely according to
the Oedipal conflict placed under the law of the father, and despite their
masculine look they are completely subjected to it. The feminine
woman, without displaying it, has managed to circumvent this law at the
same time as recognizing it, ultimately knowing how to use it to her
advantage. Her superego holds in balance maternal and paternal images,
the maternal instinct and love for the bearer of the penis.
We think that our way of understanding this part of the development
of women’s sexuality takes account of the complexity of its structure,
even though it has barely broached it. At the level of eroticism, the
aspect emphasized by Melanie Klein insists on the active desire to take
the penis into the inside of the body and keep it there, with the man
then being no more than a practically functional object, whereas the part
described by Freud, essentially more psychological, gives eroticism a
different quality, in particular through the idealization of the object
which it enables—different in comparison with this preceding aspect,
which is unequivocally marked by instinct.
146 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Basically, this double aspect only describes a banal truth: the male is
only momentarily useful for the perpetuation and safeguard of the race, a
fact which in many species, and particularly in the human species, has not
stopped him from installing a primacy which has transformed the systems
of relationship and done so in a practically irreversible way. The
movement from the desire to have a child, a primal need which fully
confers her sex on the woman, to the desire to have a child from the father
—substitute for envy for the omnipotent phallus, reparation for the
negation of the female sex by the law of the father—does not constitute a
linear path, but a structure laid down very early on containing two
antagonistic aspects. The woman is naturally the site of a permanent conflict.
What emerges from this first approach to the problem is that female
sexuality has been imprinted with a direction which subordinates it not
to male sexuality, but to phallic narcissism. This being essentially antierotic, it is just as necessary for the man to disengage himself from it as
for the woman not to knock and nag against it, in order for them to be
able some day to find themselves once more in each other’s arms. But
this subordination of female sexuality to phallic narcissism is often more
apparent than real, for in the end, this organization enables the woman to
disengage herself from deeply embedded conflicts with her mother,
thanks to the defensive possibilities she is offered by the paternal law.
None the less, this orientation of cathexes which follows the Oedipal
conflict—an orientation which, so it would seem, constitutes the human
framework for the difference of the sexes—plays so dominant a role that
it seems to us necessary to establish more precisely the elements involved.
Notes
Translated by Rachel Bowlby
1 This fact has on a number of occasions led to diagnostic errors, being
labelled ‘epileptic’ (L.Kreisler).
7
Inquiry into femininity
MICHELE MONTRELAY
…like all women you think with your sex, not with your mind.
(A.Artaud)
Why was the theory of femininity in psychoanalysis articulated from the
start in the form of an alternative? What does it mean for analysts that
they must choose between two contradictory conceptions of women:
that of Jones and that of Freud?
The posing of these questions makes it necessary to recall briefly the
contents of the two doctrines and the basis of their incompatibility. For
Freud, libido is identical in the two sexes. Moreover, it is always male in
essence. For it is the clitoris, an external and erectile part of the body,
and hence homologous to the penis, which is the girl’s erotic organ. And
when, at the moment of the Oedipus complex, she desires a child from
the father, this new object is again invested with a phallic value: the baby
is nothing but a substitute for the penile organ of which the girl now
knows she is deprived. Thus feminine sexuality is constantly elaborated as
a function of phallic reference.1
For Jones, and for the English school (Klein, Horney, Müller),
feminine libido is specific. From the start, the girl privileges the interior
of the body and the vagina: hence the archaic experiences of femininity
which leave an indelible trace. It is therefore not enough to give an
account of feminine sexuality from a ‘phallocentric’ point of view. It is
also necessary to measure the impact that anatomy and the sexual organ
itself, has on the girl’s unconscious.2
Thus Jones and his school were answering the Viennese school when
they proposed the precocious, even innate character of femininity. Freud
spoke of one libido, whereas Jones distinguished two types of libidinal
organization, male and female.
Forty years have passed: the problem of femininity continues to be
posed on the basis of the Jones-Freud contradiction. Can this
contradiction in fact be surpassed?
147
148 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Phallocentrism and concentricity
The investigations conducted by Smirgel and a team of analysts,
published as the Recherches psychoanalytiques nouvelles sur la sexualité
féminine, have recently shown that it is possible to get past the
contradiction. It is an advance which is possible from the moment one
abandons all polemical preoccupation and sticks to clinical practice.
Predictably, the book starts with a detailed analysis of the
confrontation of the two schools. But having completed the history of
this long and burning dispute and disengaged its parameters, the authors
do not take sides. Leaving the scene of the debate, they take us to the
analyst’s: there where the one who speaks is no longer the mouthpiece of
a school, but the patient on the couch.
It is rare to be given an account of large fragments of the cure; still
more rare for it to be given à propos of feminine cases. Here we have the
freedom to follow the discourse of female patients in analysis in its
rhythm, its style, and its meanderings. We are taken into the interior of
the space that this discourse circumscribes, a space that is that of the
unconscious where, as Freud has seen, negation does not exist, where
consequently the terms of a contradiction, far from excluding one
another, coexist and overlap. In fact, anyone who tries to take bearings
from these researches is referred to Freud and to Jones. For this book not
only talks of femininity according to Freud, but it also makes it speak in
an immediate way that one does not forget. An odor di femina arises from
it, which cannot be explained without reference to the work of the
English and Viennese.
Thus the Recherches calls for a double locating, which is worth
explicating at greater length here. Let us return to Freud: the essential
modalities of the organization of feminine desire cannot be grasped
without taking up in its own right the idea of phallocentrism so decried
by Freud’s contemporaries. The book makes constant and explicit
reference to it—but specifying that the phallus cannot be identified with
the penis. In fact, far from signifying an anatomical reality, the phallus
designates, according to this book, the ideas and values that the penile
organ represents. By freeing the concept of the phallus from the organic
context with which it is still often confounded, the authors enable us
truly to grasp the nature of phallocentrism: ‘There is every reason for
separating the study of penis-envy from any consideration of the penis
itself as a thing.’3 It is necessary, on the contrary, to specify the ideal
dimension to which the male organ refers: ‘penis-envy is always envy of
the idealized penis’.4
Simultaneously, the models that are put forward in order to account
for feminine desire make clear on the clinical level the real implications
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 149
of ‘phallocentrism’: the authors are not fooled by a patient who declares
herself impotent and humiliated on the pretext that she is ‘only a
woman’. The penis envy latent in these remarks is not reducible to an
instinct. It is impossible to legitimate it through an alleged state of
castration for which phylogenesis would bear the responsibility’.5
On the contary, the desire for the penis can be analyzed only in as
much as it arises from a complex elaboration, constructed in order to
maintain the phallic power of the father. Only those patients whose
fathers’ prestige and symbolic status had been threatened posit the
possession of the penile organ as indispensable. Their sufferings and their
symptoms appear in order to make plain that the essential is withdrawn
from them, namely, the penis confounded in the imagination with the
phallus. Thus the phallic power of the father is fantasmatically assured.
In the other accounts of homosexual or ‘normal’ women, in every
case, a particular form of relation to the paternal phallus can be traced, in
which it is always a question of maintaining an inaccessible term, so that
desire can subsist. It is a subtly constructed relation, but one that does not
differ in its nature from that set up by the man: as the detailed account of
a masculine case of perversion makes clear enough.6
In showing that desire is only ever pure artifice, the book thereby
discards the hypothesis of the innateness of desire that the English school
had advanced in relation to femininity. It confirms the correctness of
Freud’s reservations in regard to this ‘natural’ femininity on which Jones
insisted so much.7
And yet the Recherches takes up the main point of the clinical work of
the English school. The article by Grunberger, especially, insists on the
specifically concentric organization of feminine sexuality.8 He shows that it
is as if the woman, more so than the man, remains dependent on the
drives, in which the authors see, like Jones, the indication of archaic,
oral, anal, and vaginal schemas.
‘Often, for the little girl, it is the mouth which takes up symbolically,
and for reasons on which Jones has insisted, the value of a vaginal organ,’
Luquet-Parat remarks.9 And further on Maria Torok develops the theory
of the English school:
M.Klein, E.Jones and K.Horney have indicated long before we did,
the precocity of the child’s discovery and repression of vaginal
sensations. We, for our part, have observed that the encounter with
the other sex was always a reminder of the awakening of our own.
Clinically, penis-envy and the discovery of the sex of the boy are
often seen associated with a repressed memory of orgasmic experiences.10
150 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Thus two theoretical positions, hitherto considered incompatible, are
both verified within the framework of a clinical study. The Jones-Freud
contradiction therefore appears to be surpassed.
The contradiction displaced
But this transcendence remains implicit. The authors never formulate it
as the outcome or culmination of their work. Let us look at these few
lines where Grunberger analyses feminine narcissism, ‘That which’,
characterizes ‘…the libidinal cathexis of the woman, is its concentric
character and at the same time the phallus.’11
To simultaneously affirm the ‘concentric’ and phallic character of
feminine sexuality is to declare that both Freud and Jones are right. But
surely it then becomes necessary to formulate a new point of view
through which the truth of the two schools would be maintained?
This point of view is not formulated within the framework of the
book; rather, the Freud-Jones contradiction seems to gradually lose its
relevance in the face of clinical practice. And yet the verification of two
incompatible propositions does not do away with the contradiction that
links them. The fact that phallocentrism and concentricity may be
equally constitutive of feminine sexuality does not prove that they make
up a harmonious unit. It is my contention, that, on the contrary, they
coexist as incompatible and that it is this incompatibility that is specific to
the feminine unconscious.
Thus the most important thing about this work, that is, the
displacement to which the authors submit the basic contradiction, is not
sufficiently brought out. They should have stressed that the Freud-Jones
incompatibility, although it was first articulated as a polemic, is far more
than a disagreement of two schools. For, once this disagreement and the
passions it arouses have subsided, the contradiction emerges again as a
play of forces which structures the feminine unconscious itself.
Phallocentrism and concentricity, both simultaneously constitutive of the
unconscious, confront each other according to two modes: the first, the
more spectacular, appears as anxiety; but the same relation of forces, plays,
inversely, in sublimation. Each of these determining processes of the
unconscious economy will be seen at play in the incompatibility of the
two aspects of femininity analyzed by Jones and Freud.
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 151
The dark continent
The representation of castration
Let us start with anxiety in general, from what we know of this in so far
as it is common to both sexes. This global approach will allow us to
situate better in what follows the specifically feminine processes of anxiety.
Anxiety in psychoanalysis is most often described as ‘castration
anxiety’, that is to say, as the horror that seizes the child on discovering
the penisless body of the mother. It is this discovery that engenders the
fear of one day undergoing the same fate.
It is true that in each cure, the analyst must reckon with the
‘imprescriptible’ force of this fear of mutilation.12 But this is not anxiety:
to represent to oneself the motive of one’s fear, is already to give a reason
for it. But anxiety is without reason. What we mean is that it supposes the
impossibility of any rational thought. In other words, anxiety appears as
the limit-moment when conscious and unconscious representation are
blocked off.
How are we to analyze this blockage? By specifying at first the nature
of the representation that is its object. Three positions based on Lacanian
theory will serve us as points of reference:
1 The unconscious is a structure or combinatory of desires articulated
as representations.
2 These representations can be called representations of castration,
inasmuch as their literal articulation effectively deprives the subject of
a part of jouissancei
3 The stake is this jouissance, whose loss is the price of representation.
Let us take these three propositions:
1. Unconscious representation, which is what this article is concerned
with, refers to different processes from those currently designated by the
term ‘representation’. The latter, ordinarily, concerns the conscious; it
explains the reflexive activity that applies itself to the reality of the
(philosophic) subject and to objects. Unconscious representation, on the
contrary, neither reflects nor signifies the subject and its objects. It is a
pure cathexis of the word as such. How is this possible? An example will
make it clear to us: consider the distinction between conscious and
unconscious representations of castration.
2. The conscious representation of castration in the child does not
designate any real mutilation. It is an imaginary evocation: either it is the
other who threatens by uttering a prohibition (the case of the boy); or
152 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
the little girl in order to explain the absence of the penis to herself
images: ‘someone must have taken it from me’.
Such a representation takes on an unconscious status at the moment at
which it no longer refers to anything but the words that constitute it.
Taken out of reality, it no longer refers to anything other than its form:
what is now cathected, both in the prohibiting utterance and the
phantasmatic imagination, is their specific articulation and the multiple
puns, the play of sonorities and images that this articulation makes
possible. But how can words become the objects of such a cathexis? Why
do they mobilize all the strength of the unconscious? Leaving these
questions open and referring the reader back to Freud,13 let us remark
only that the words, in the first moments of life, extended the body of
the mother and simultaneously circumscribed the place of suspension
(suspense) of her desire. In words, therefore, the most real of jouissance
and the furthest of the phallus were conjoined. Perhaps, in the
unconscious, the power of words remains the same?
3. Consequently, the unconscious representation is only a text. But the
text produces effects: since sexuality is organized as we have seen, not
according to some instinct, some ‘tendency’, but according to what has
been said. Consequently, discourse makes impossible any direct and
peaceable relation to the body, to the world, and to pleasure. It turns
away from jouissance: it is in this sense that it is castrating. In other words,
the unconscious representation of castration is, in the first place, a
castrating representation.
But, at the same time, the term ‘representation’ must be taken in a
second sense. For the sequence of discourse having once marked us,
endlessly reproduces itself. And we can define the unconscious as the
place where these re-presentations are indefinitely staged. This fact of
repetition, of the eternal return of words, has been sufficiently
demonstrated for us to take it as given here: if the representation then
does not cease to represent itself, how can it disappear? Yet, the analyst
must reckon with this effacement. For the patient, who expresses anxiety
after the event, is speaking of a time when nothing was thinkable: then,
the body and the world were confounded in one chaotic intimacy that
was too present, too immediate—one continuous expanse of proximity
or unbearable plenitude. What was lacking was a lack, an empty ‘space’
somewhere. Indeed, it seems in these clinical cases that the castrating
dimension of representation is missing. Consequently, it is as if
representation, at least in its effects, had wiped itself out.
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 153
Oedipus and the stake
To explain the persistence of the representation as well as its vacillation
in anxiety, let us pause at the hypothesis we set out a moment ago. Let us
imagine that at certain moments, the representation is indeed produced,
but without castrating effects: emptily circulating, it would lose the
power of turning the subject away from jouissance. This, not as a function
of facts inherent in representation itself, but from an intrusion, a
violence, emanating from the real. Perhaps a reading of Sophocles’ drama
Oedipus Rex, will serve as clarification.
At the begining of the drama, Oedipus appears as he whose relation to
representation is sufficiently assured to unravel the enigmas of the
Sphinx. And yet, the tragic action will progressively disclose the ruin of
this representation.
The ancients used to say that this ruin was willed by the gods. The
analyst declares that Oedipus was led to it by his incestuous desires. We
must hold simultaneously to the idea of gods who persecute and to that
of the subject who desires. For the theme of the fateful mistake, of the
plan controlled by external forces, emphasizes this essential fact: that the
realization of unconscious desire is always so catastrophic that the subject
can never bring it about on its own.
It is one thing to desire, another to realize this desire. We have seen
that to desire is to represent the lacking object (the other), that is to say,
to ‘enjoy’ (‘jouir’) exclusively in the form of words. To satisfy this desire
is, on the contrary, to decathect words to the profit of reality: in other
words, enjoyment of the mother leads back to a recuperation of the stake
that, endlessly replayed, is normally the guarantee of representation.
This is why it is necessary that desire should not be realized. Hence the
repression that ensures that one does not think, nor see, nor take the
desired object, even and above all if it is within reach: this object must
remain lost.
But in Oedipus, the gods, or chance, restores the object of desire:
Oedipus enjoys Jocasta. But, simultaneously, repression continues to take
place, and in an ever more pressing manner: the successive recourses to
Tiresias, to sacrifices, and to the law show a desperate effort to avoid
seeing the cause of the pestilence. An effort that is ineffectual: repression
is no longer anything but a gigantic pantomime, powerless to assure the
throwing back into play of the stake of desire. We know that, for want
of a stake, representation is not worth anything.
Thus Oedipus’ tragedy enables us to emphasize both the economy and
the failure of representation at the same time. But it also suggests the
cause of this failure. Why does the encounter with the Sphinx take place
immediately before the drama? To what does the Sphinx refer, this
154 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
reasoning and devouring hybrid being, which beats its wings as it talks?
Why does this monster, a woman with the body of a beast, take up her
place at the gates of Thebes?
Does not the encounter with this enigmatic figure of femininity
threaten every subject? Is it not she who is at the root of the ruin of
representation?
Freud, asking himself about feminine sexuality and assessing the small
purchase that it offers analytic investigation, compared it to a ‘dark continent’.
The Recherches nouvelles begins by recalling this formula. How
appropriate! And yet it is as if the authors do not see the threatening
shadows that they call forth by these words. For feminine sexuality is not
a dark, unexplored continent through any provisional insufficiency of
research: it is unexplored to the extent that it is unexplorable.
Of course one can describe it, give an account of it in clinical or
theoretical work. But it is elsewhere, in the framework of the cure, that
femininity stubbornly resists analysis. On the couch, a discourse
analogous to that whose style the book renders so well, is enunciated:
‘live’ discourse, whose very immediacy seems to be a sign of life. But it is
this immediacy, this life, which is an obstacle to analysis: the word is
understood only as the extension of the body that is there in the process
of speaking. It seems no longer to be hiding anything. To the extent that
it does not know repression, femininity is the downfall of interpretation.
It is femininity, not women, that can take on such a status. Let us
specify what meaning will be given here to the three terms: woman,
femininity, repression:
• the word ‘woman’ will designate the subject who, like the man, is an
effect of unconscious representation;
• by ‘femininity’ will be understood the set of the ‘feminine’ drives
(oral, anal, vaginal) in so far as these resist the processes of repression;
• finally, repression will be distinguished from censorship:14 the latter is
always submitted to; the former, on the contrary, has the value of an
act. In fact, the obstacles the censor opposes to libidinal development
appear as the result of the experiences of the Other’s desire.
Regressions or fixations have made it impossible for the mother or
the father to symbolize this or that key-event in the child’s sexuality.
And from then on, this ‘blank’, this unspoken, functions like a check;
the censor that is set up appears as the effect of an absence of
representation. It is therefore unrepresentable, and consequently
‘uninterpretable’. Repression on the contrary, presupposes a
symbolization: as we have seen, it allows the representation to be
cathected as such, while the real satisfaction, renounced, becomes its
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 155
stake. Repression is always a process that structures on the level of the
psychic economy.
As we will see, feminine eroticism is more censored, less repressed than
that of the man. It lends itself less easily to a ‘losing itself as the stake of
unconscious representation. The drives whose force was demonstrated by
the English school circumscribe a place or ‘continent’ that can be called
‘dark’ to the extent that it is outside the circumference of the symbolic
economy (forecluded).
What are the processes which maintain femininity ‘outside repression’,
in a state of nature, as it were?
The first, of a social order, concerns the absence of prohibitions: the
girl is less subject than the boy to the threats and to the defenses that
penalize masturbation. We keep silent about her masturbation, all the
more as it is less observable. Françoise Dolto15 has shown that, sheltered
by their privacy, the girl, the woman, can live a ‘protected’ sexuality.
One tends to refer to the anxiety of rape and penetration without
emphasizing that, in reality, on the contrary, the girl risks little. The
anatomy of the boy, on the other hand, exposes him very early to the
realization that he is not master either of the manifestations of his desire
or of the extent of his pleasures. He experiments, not only with chance
but also with the law and with his sexual organ: his body itself takes on
the value of stake.
In relation to castration, therefore, the position of the man differs from
that of the woman whose sexuality is capable of remaining on the edge
of all repression. Under certain circumstances, then, the stake of
castration for the woman finds itself displaced: it consists in the sexuality
and the desire of the other sex, most often that of the father and then, of
the masculine partner. Which is why Perrier and Granoff have been able
to show ‘the extreme feminine sensibility to all experiences relating to
the castration of the man’.16
Yet other processes, of an instinctual and not a social order, maintain
feminine sexuality outside the economy of representation—the
intrication of the oral-anal drives with vaginal pleasure. Jones, Klein, and
Dolto have insisted on the fact that the girl’s archaic experiences of the
vagina are organized as a function of pre-established oral-anal schemas.
At the further extreme, precocious sexuality ‘turns’ around a single
orifice, an organ that is both digestive and vaginal, which ceaselessly
tends to absorb, to appropriate, to devour. We find again here the theme
of concentricity disengaged by the authors of the book.
If this insatiable organ-hole is at the center of precocious sexuality, if it
inflects all psychic movement according to circular and closed schemas, it
compromises woman’s relation to castration and the law: to absorb, to
156 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
take, to understand, is to reduce the world to the most archaic instinctual
‘laws’. It is a movement opposed to that presupposed by castration:
where the jouissance of the body loses itself ‘for’ a discourse that is Other.
Here, we will not therefore question the truth of the clinical
observations produced by the English school: all experience of child
analysis confirms the precocity of the ‘knowledge’ of the vagina. More
generally, it is quite true that the very small girl experiences her
femininity very early. But, simultaneously, it must be stressed that such a
precocity, far from favoring a possible ‘maturation’, acts as an obstacle to it,
since it maintains eroticism outside the representation of castration.
Anxiety and the relation to the body
A third series of processes stand in the way of repression: those
concerning the woman’s relation to her own body, a relation
simultaneously narcissistic and erotic. For the woman enjoys her body as
she would the body of another. Every occurrence of a sexual kind
(puberty, erotic experiences, maternity, etc.) happens to her as if it came
from another (woman): every occurrence is the fascinating actualization
of theii femininity of all women, but also and above all, of that of the
mother. It is as if ‘to become woman’, ‘to be woman’ gave access to a
jouissance of the body as feminine and/or maternal. In the self-love she
bears herself, the woman cannot differentiate her own body from that
which was ‘the first object’.
We would have to specify further what is only intimated here: that the
real of the body, in taking form at puberty, in charging itself with
intensity and importance and presence, as object of the lover’s desire,
reactualizes, reincarnates, the real of that other body, which, at the
beginning of life was the substance of words, the organizer of desire;
which, later on, was also the material of archaic repression. Recovering
herself as maternal body (and also as phallus), the woman can no longer
repress, ‘lose’, the first stake of representation. As in the tragedy,
representation is threatened by ruin. But at the root of this threat there
are different processes: for Oedipus, the restoration of the stake
proceeded by chance, from the gods; it was effected in spite of a
prohibition. Nothing, on the contrary, is forbidden for the woman; there
is no statement or law that prohibits the recovery of the stake since the
real which imposes itself and takes the place of repression and desire is,
for her, the real of her own body.
From now on, anxiety, tied to the presence of this body, can only be
insistent, continuous. This body, so close, which she has to occupy, is an
object in excess that must be ‘lost’, that is to say, repressed, in order to be
symbolized. Hence the symptoms that so often simulate this loss: ‘there is
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 157
no longer anything, only the hole, emptiness’. Such is the leitmotif of all
feminine cure, which it would be a mistake to see as the expression of an
alleged ‘castration’. On the contrary, it is a defense produced in order to
parry the avatars, the deficiencies, of symbolic castration.
The analyst often finds a ‘fear of femininity’ in connection with
feminine anxiety, especially in the adolescent. We have tried to show
that this fear is not a result of fantasies of violation and breaking in
(effraction) alone. At bottom, it is fear of the feminine body as a nonrepressed and unrepresentable object. In other words, femininity,
‘according to Jones’, that is, femininity experienced as real and
immediate, is the blind spot of the symbolic processes analyzed by Freud.
Two incompatible, heterogeneous territories coexist inside the feminine
unconscious: that of representation and that which remains ‘the dark
continent’.
Defenses and masquerade
It is rare for anxiety to manifest itself as such in analysis. It is usually
camouflaged by the defenses that it provokes. It is a question of
organizing a representation of castration that is no longer symbolic, but
imaginary: a lack is simulated and thereby the loss of some stake—an
undertaking all the more easily accomplished precisely because feminine
anatomy exhibits a lack, that of the penis. At the same time as being her
own phallus, therefore, the woman will disguise herself with this lack,
throwing into relief the dimension of castration as trompe-l’oeil.
The ways in which this can occur are multiple. One can play on the
absence of the penis through silence just as well as through a resounding
vanity. One can make it the model of erotic, mystical, and neurotic
experiences. The anorexic refusal of food is a good example of the desire
to reduce and to dissolve her own flesh, to take her own body as a
cipher. Masochism also mimes the lack, through passivity, impotence,
and doing nothing (‘ne rien faire’). The observations of Helene Deutsch
and those of the Recherches nouvelles could be understood in this way.
Castration is similarly disguised in the register of erotic fiction: where the
feminine orifice, O, is ‘falsely’ represented in its successive metamorphoses.
Here, I would rather turn to the poets, those who have written in the
novelistic or made films out of the feminine drama (‘cinema’), since the
limitations of this article rule out any detailed consideration of clinical cases.
Take Fellini, the director of Juliette of the Spirits, a film so baffling, no
doubt, because it brings out the presence of the ‘dark continent’ so well.
The dimension of femininity that Lacan designates as masquerade, taking
the term from Joan Rivière,iii takes shape in this piling up of crazy things,
feathers, hats, and strange baroque constructions, which rise up like so
158 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
many silent insignias. But what we must see is that the objective of such
a masquerade is to say nothing. Absolutely nothing. And in order to
produce this nothing the woman uses her own body as disguise.
The novels of Marguerite Duras use the same world of stupor and
silence. It could be shown that this silence, this non-speech, again
exhibits the fascinating dimension of feminine lack: Duras wants to make
this lack ‘speak’ as cry (Moderato Cantabile), or as ‘music’. Here, let us
simply recall what is said in the Ravishment of Lol V Stein: ‘what was
needed was a word-absence, a word hole…it could not have been
spoken, it could only be made to resound’.17
Thus the sex, the vagino-oral organ of the woman, acts as obstacle to
castration; at the same time, ‘falsely’ representing the latter in its effects of
allurement, which provoke anxiety. This is why man has always called
the feminine defenses and masquerade evil.
Woman is not accused of thinking or of committing this evil, but of
incarnating it.iv It is this evil that scandalizes whenever woman ‘plays out’
her sex in order to evade the word and the law. Each time she subverts a
law or a word that relies on the predominantly masculine structure of the
look. Freud says that Evil is experienced as such when anxiety grips the
child in front of the unveiled body of his mother. ‘Did his desire then
refer only to this hole of flesh?’ The woman affords a glimpse of the
Real, by virtue of her relation to nothing—that is to say, to the Thing.
At this moment, the Symbolic collapses into the Real. Freud also says
that the pervert cannot see the castrated body of his mother. In this sense,
every man is a pervert. On the one hand, he enjoys without saying so,
without coming too close—for then he would have to take upon himself
a terrible anxiety, or even hate; he enjoys by proxy the thing he glimpses
through the mother. On the other hand, he does not appear to
understand that her relation to the thing is sublimated. It is this evil
which has to be repressed.
A film like Day of Wrathv lays bare all the masculine ‘defenses’ against
femininity and woman’s direct relation to jouissance. The man is
terrorized by the threat that femininity raises for ‘his’ repression. In order
to reassure him and convince him, the woman always advances further
along her own path by explaining herself, wishing to speak the truth. But
she does not understand that her discourse will not and cannot be
received. For the fact of bypassing the law of repression precisely by
saying all contaminates the most precious truth and makes it suspect,
odious, and condemnable. Hence masculine censure.
The frustrations, interdictions, and contempt that have weighed on
women for centuries may indeed be absurd and arbitrary, but they do not
matter. The main thing is the fact of imposing the definitive
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 159
abandonment of jouissance. The scandal can then come to an end—the
feminine sex bears witness to castration.
The analyst, for his part, cannot define feminine castration simply as
the effect of his strictures. If the exemplar of the hysterical, neurotic
woman is one who never lets up wishing to be her sex, inversely, isn’t the
‘adult’ woman one who reconstructs her sexuality in a field that goes beyond
sex? The principle of a masculine libido upheld by Freud could be
clarified as a function of this ‘extraterritoriality’.
Jouissance and sublimation
Feminine castration: hypotheses
Once again, let us take an example from literature. Klossowski’s portraits
of women easily lend themselves to a clinical commentary. We might be
surprised at the astonishingly virile attributes (both anatomical and
psychical) with which the author endows his heroines and deduce from
them some perversion. It is also possible to see in these attributes the
material of a moral fable outlining a type of perfected femininity: the
‘true’ woman, the ‘femme’ woman would be drawn as she who has
forgotten’ her femininity, and who would entrust the jouissance and the
representation of it to another. For this reason, Klossowski’s heroine,
Roberte, could in no way talk about herself, her body or ‘the word that
it conceals’.18 It is someone else’s task to hold the discourse of femininity,
in love and/or in a novel.
Under the sign of this forgetting a second economy of desire, where
the stake is no longer the same, can effectively be described. The stake is
now precocious femininity and not the penis or masculine sexuality:
precocious femininity becomes the material of repression. ‘According to
Jones’ one or several periods of latency correspond to this decathexis of
sexuality, periods during which the little girl and the woman disentangle
themselves from their own bodies and their pleasures. This is why
periods of frigidity in analysis can often be considered as an index of
progress: they mark the moment when the patient decathects the vaginaloral schemas, which till then were alone capable of providing access to
erotic pleasure.
The decisive step by which the feminine unconscious is modified lies,
not so much in the change of love object19 as in the change in the
unconscious representative. Masculine, phallic representatives are
substituted for the first ‘concentric’ representatives. The law and the
paternal ideals of the father that are articulated in her discourse constitute
the new representatives capable of supplanting the models of archaic
representations (feminine Oedipus).
160 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Let us note that this substitution does not mutilate the woman and
deprive her of a penis that she never had, but deprives her of the sense of
precocious sexuality. Femininity is forgotten, indeed repressed, and this
loss constitutes the symbolic castration of the woman.
For clarity’s sake, let us draw a diagram of these hypotheses on the
economy of the feminine unconscious.
This diagram calls for three comments.
1 The parameters of the feminine economy still refer to Jones and to
Freud, but in opposite directions.
2 In clinical practice, such a clear-cut distinction is not observed. The
two forms of economy usually coexist, with one predominating
(provisionally or definitively) over the other.
3 The notion of sublimation has been introduced.
If we can show that in an economy of type II all relation to jouissance,
including sexual pleasure, is of a sublimatory kind, then not only will a
specific dimension of feminine sexuality be clarified, but a
misinterpretation of sublimation will also be avoided: that which consists
in seeing in sublimation a passage from the sexual to the non-sexual.
Sublimation and metaphor
In the cure and more specifically, in the transference (i.e., the set of
unconscious modifications produced by the enunciation of discourse on
the couch), the dimension of pleasure can emerge.
In the Recherches M.Torok speaks of its manifestation: ‘when one of
my patients has understood an interpretation, when, consequently, an
inhibition is lifted, a frequent indication of this advance is that the patient
dreams and in this dream she has an orgasm’ (a description of one of
these dreams follows).20
M.Torok, by insisting on the fact that a pleasure arises when a new
representation is elaborated, tells us what is essential about this pleasure.
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 161
Contrary to what one might think, this pleasure does not lie in the lifting
of an inhibition, that is, in the releasing of a tension, contained for too
long. On the contrary, the pleasure, far from being explicable by the
cliché of release (‘défoulement’),vi arises from the putting in place of new
representations. Let us note that these were first enunciated by the other,
the analyst, who, in interpreting, verbally articulates something of a
sexuality maintained till then in the state of nature, in the ‘dark’.
Here, therefore, pleasure is the effect of the word of the other. More
specifically, it occurs at the advent of a structuring discourse. For what is
essential in the cure of a woman is not making sexuality more ‘conscious’
or interpreting it, at least not in the sense normally given to this term.
The analyst’s word takes on a completely different function. It no longer
explains, but from the sole fact of articulating, it structures. By verbally
putting in place a representation of castration, the analyst’s word makes
sexuality pass into discourse. This type of interpretation therefore
represses, at least in the sense given to the word here.
Understood in this way, interpretation can perhaps help us to locate a
certain cultural and social function of psychoanalysis. The Freudian
theory of sexuality was developed (mise en place) in relation to women
and femininity. We can ask whether psychoanalysis was not articulated
precisely in order to repress femininity (in the sense of producing its
symbolic representation). At the same time, Freud’s reservations about
Jones would make sense: the attempts to ‘make’ femininity ‘speak’ would
surely jeopardize the very repression that Freud had known how to achieve.
Let us return to our example. What pleasure can there be in the
repression that is produced at the moment of interpretation? First, let us
say that interpretation, as it is analyzed here, does not consist so much in
explaining and commenting, as in articulating. Here again, it is the form
of words which must be emphasized. In response to the analysand’s
fantasy, the analyst enunciates a certain number of signifiers necessarily
relating to his own desire and his listening-place. These words are other,
the analyst’s discourse is not reflexive, but different. As such it is a
metaphor, not a mirror, of the patient’s discourse. And, precisely,
metaphor is capable of engendering pleasure.
First Freud and then Lacan analyzed the motives of this pleasure with
regard to the joke. We laugh when we perceive that the words speak a
text other than that which we thought. And if the other laughs, if the
misapprehension plays on one more register, the pleasure becomes
keener still. What function does this other text, this other ear, have? It
has the function of engendering a metaphor, that is to say, of substituting
itself for the preceding text and listening-place. Pleasure arises the
moment this metaphor is produced. Lacan says that it is identified with
the very meaning of the metaphor.21
162 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
In what then, does this meaning, bereft of signification, consist? We
can define it as the measure of the empty ‘space’ induced by repression.
The metaphor, by posing itself as that which is not spoken, hollows out
and designates this space. Freud said that the pleasure of the joke lies in
the return of the repressed. Does it not rather, lie in putting the dimension
for repression into play on the level of the text itself?
It is this pleasure of the joke that can be evoked in relation to all
sublimation. For it is an operation that consists in opening up new
divisions and spaces in the material that it transforms. In the transference,
the patient’s orgasm took note of an interpretation. Surely this is best
represented as a breath of air between two signifiers, suddenly opened up
by the metaphor?
The orgasm, like a burst of laughter, testifies to the meaning—insignificant
—of the analyst’s word. We must now try to rediscover this dimension
of ‘wit’ in pleasure and jouissance.
Pleasure and jouissance
Feminine erotic pleasure varies considerably in its nature and effects.
There is variety in the places of the body cathected, in the level of
intensity, in the outcome (orgasm or not), and in the effects: a ‘successful’
sexual relation can cause calm or anxiety. Let us also remember that a
neurosis cannot necessarily be inferred from frigidity: and that,
reciprocally, psychotics and very immature women have intense vaginal
orgasms.22
How are we to make sense of the exuberance, the bizarreness, and the
paradoxes of these pleasures? By referring less to the varieties of form and
intensity than to their function in the psychic economy. Here again, we
will distinguish two types of sexual pleasure: the precocious and the
sublimated.
The first was earlier seen to be the effect of the experience of archaic
sexuality. Even if it involves two people, even if it presents the
appearance of an adult sexuality, it merely re-actualizes or raises to the
highest pitch in orgasm, the jouissance that the woman has of herself.23 In
this type of pleasure, the other’s look and his desire further reinforces the
circularity of the erotic relation. Hence the anxiety that arises before and
after the sexual act.
Inversely, pleasure can be structuring in its effects. The sort of ‘genius’,
of inspiration that the woman discovers after love, shows that an event of
an unconscious nature has occurred, which has enabled her to take up a
certain distance from the dark continent.
We will call sublimated pleasure that which takes the same form as
incestuous pleasure while none the less presupposing and confirming
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 163
woman’s access to the symbolic. This pleasure is no longer derived from
femininity as such, but from the signifies more precisely, from the repression
that it brings about: this is why sublimated pleasure is identified with the
pleasure derived from the joke.
Such a transformation is on a par with the mutation which has been
outlined above as the passage from Type I to Type II sexual economy.
The latter assumes, on the one hand, the forgetting of precocious
femininity, and on the other, the setting in place of a new representative
or signifier of castration. Does not the sublimated sexual act constitute for
the woman, one of the ways of putting a Type II economy into place, where:
1 the signifier would be actualized in the rhythm, the periodic return
of the penis;
2 the stake would consist of the repressed feminine drives,24 inseparable
from the penis itself;
3 pleasure would be the meaning of the metaphor through which the
penis ‘would repress’ the body, feminine sexuality.
Let us be more precise: the penis, its throbbing, its cadence, and the
movements of love-making could be said to produce the purest and most
elementary form of signifying articulation, that of a series of blows that
mark out the space of the body.
It is this which opens up rhythms all the more ample and intense, a
jouissance all the more keen and serious in that the penis, the object
which is its instrument, is scarcely anything.
But to state this is to state a paradox: the penis produces jouissance
because it incarnates a finitude. Sublimation always implies a deidealization. The phallic signifier, detached from the terrifying
representations of the superego that revolve around the imaginary
phallus, must appear as an object of not-much-meaning.25
This step, usually suspended during childhood, takes place after the
first sexual experiences of adulthood. Is it a question of unconscious
processes? Provided the ground has been prepared, life and a certain ethic
undertake this work. To the extent that romantic idealization is
successfully mourned (relinquished), to the extent that the dimension of
the gift predominates, the penis can objectify, by its very insignificance,
the ‘difficulty to be’ of the couple, in which jouissance is lost. Thus it can
no longer be separated in its consistency from the material of this archaic,
feminine jouissance that has been renounced. It embodies it as lost, and all
of a sudden restores it a hundredfold. For it deploys this jouissance in
direct proportion to the forgetting, which is in itself infinite.
Thus, ethics is indissociable from a ‘certain’ relation to jouissance. The deidealization that it implies alone makes possible the occasional coming
164 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
together and binding of two perfectly distinct, heterogeneous spaces. The
voluptuous sensation of an aspiration of the whole body in a space
absolutely Other and consequently, infinite, cannot simply be explained
as the effect of the perception of the vaginal cavity. It implies that this
cavity is hollowed out by repression, that is to say, by a symbolic operation.
Consequently, pleasure, far from being reduced to the excitation of an
organ, on the contrary, transports the ‘woman into the field of the
signifer. Sublimated pleasure, like the dream and hypnosis, like the poetic
act, marks a moment when the unconscious representation takes on an
absolute value: in other words, when the act of articulating produces on
its own the meaning of discourse (meaning nothing). Sweeping away all
signification, it lays hold of the woman and catches her in its progression
and its rhythms.26
For the man, exceptions aside,27 this transportation into the signifier
cannot be produced in so violent and radical a way. In fact, how could
he abandon himself to that which he himself controls, and from whose
play he gives pleasure (jouissance)? Moreover, this game (play) involves
the risk of detumescence,28 and also the vertigo and anxiety aroused by
the absolute of feminine demand: the woman expects and receives all
there is of the penis at the moment of love.
If we no longer consider what is properly called pleasure, but the
orgasm usually designed as ‘jouissance’ by the analyst, a similar distinction
must be made between jouissance of Type I and the orgasm that is
produced in a sublimated economy. In the former, the residue of
pleasure comes to a dead end, since the woman again found herself
powerless to maintain the unconscious economy. This form of orgasm,
registering pleasure outside significance (signifiance), bars access to the
symbolic. Sublimation, on the contrary, transports not only pleasure but
the orgasm into metaphor. Orgasm, endlessly renewed, brought to a
white heat, explodes at the moment of pleasure. It bursts in the double
sense of the French term éclater. the sense of deflagration and that of a
revelation. There is therefore a continuity of the ascent of pleasure and of
its apogee in orgasm: the one carries the signifier to its maximum
incandescence; the other marks the moment when the discourse, in
exploding under the effect of its own force, comes to the point of breaking,
of coming apart. It is no longer anything.
To break itself, to disjoint itself, in other words, to articulate itself
through a meaning that endlessly escapes. Orgasm in discourse leads us to
the point where feminine jouissance can be understood as writing (écriture)—
to the point where it must appear that this jouissance and the literary text
(which is also written like an orgasm produced from within discourse)
are the effect of the same murder of the signifier.
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 165
Isn’t this way Bataille, Jarry, and Jabès speak of writing as the
jouissance of a woman? And why that which she is writing is the Name?vii
Notes
Translated by Parveen Adams, with acknowledgement to Jacqueline
Rose for her invaluable advice.
1 S.Freud, compare, on this subject in particular: ‘Three Essays’, (1905), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VII;
‘Femininity’ (1932), vol. XXII; The dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’
(1924), vol. XIX.
2 E.Jones, ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’, International Journal
of Psycho-analysis (1927), vol. VIII; ‘The Phallic Phase’ (1933), vol. XIV;
‘Early Female Sexuality’ (1935), vol. XVI.
3 J.Chasseguet-Smirgel, C.J.Luquet-Parat, B.Grunberger, J.McDougall,
M.Torok, C.David, Recherches psychoanalytiques nouvelles sur la sexualité
féminine, Payot, 1964. M.Torok, ‘La signification de l’envie de phallus chez
le femme’, p. 184.
4 Ibid., p. 186.
5 Ibid., p. 132.
6 Ibid., p. 65–90.
7 On phallocentrism and the innateness of desire, see ‘La phase phallique’,
Scilicet 1, Seuil: a rigorous restatement of the theoretical positions of Freud
and Jones on femininity from the position of Lacanian theory; trans. in J.
Mitchell and J.Rose (eds) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école
freudienne, Macmillan, 1982.
8 Recherches, p. 103.
9 Ibid., pp. 124–5.
10 Ibid., p. 191.
11 Ibid., p. 103 (author’s emphasis).
12 Ibid., p. 67.
13 S.Freud, ‘Repression’ and ‘The Unconscious’, SE, vol. XIV.
14 This distinction is not always made. These two types of process are usually
designated by the term ‘repression’ (primary and secondary).
15 F.Dolto, ‘La libido et son destin féminin’, La psychanalyse, VII.
16 W.Granoff and F.Perrier, ‘Le problème de la perversion chez la femme et
les idéaux feminins’. La psychanalyse, VII. This article is essential for
theoretical work on feminine sexuality.
17 Marguerite Duras, La Ravissement de Lol V.Stein, Gallimard, p. 54.
18 P.Klossowski, Les Lois de l’hospitalité, p. 145.
19 The ‘change of object’ designates the renunciation of the first love object,
the mother, in favor of the father. On this problem see J.Luquet-Parat, ‘Le
changement d’objet’, Recherches, p. 124ff.
20 Recherches, p. 192.
166 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
21 Apropos of metaphor, see J.Lacan, ‘The agency of the letter in the
unconscious’, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A.Sheridan, Tavistock, 1977, and ‘Les
formations de l’inconscient’, Séminaire 1956–1957. On pleasure by the same
author: ‘Propos directifs pour un congrès sur la sexualité féminine’, Ecrits,
Seuil, 1966, trans. in J.Mitchell and J.Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques
Lacan and the école freudienne.
22 See F.Dolto.
23 See P.Aulagnier, Le Desir et la perversion, Seuil.
24 Drives repressed both in the course of earlier Oedipal experiences as well as
in the present, by the very fact of the presence of the penis.
25 This paragraph and the following one were added to the earlier Critique
article in 1976 in order to clear up a misunderstanding. Only someone who
idealizes the signifier could interpret the fact of relating to jouissance to an
operation of sublimation and to the putting into play of the signifier’s
‘frenzied idealization’ (C.David). I take as a tribute—no doubt unintended—
what someone exclaimed apropos of this article: ‘So, the jouissance of the
woman is produced by the operations of the Holy Ghost!’ It can happen!
26 If the woman, at the moment of orgasm, identifies herself radically with an
unconscious representation, articulated by the other, then does she not find
herself again precisely in the archaic situation where the maternal
representation was the sole organizer of fantasy? The reply could be in the
affirmative for orgasms of the psychotic or neurotic (acute hysteria) type. In
these cases, pleasure and orgasm are nothing more than the manifestation of,
among other things, a sort of direct seizure of the woman by the Other’s
discourse. For the woman, who, on the contrary, assumes her castration,
this relation is indirect: it passes through the (paternal) metaphor of the
maternal discourse, a metaphor that, as we have seen, presupposes an
economy of desire in which the woman puts herself at stake.
27 Except in the case of actual homosexuality. We must be careful, however,
not to set up too clear-cut a distinction between the sexuality of the man
and that of the woman. Without pretending to settle the whole problem of
bisexuality here, let us only say that every masculine subject is cathected as
the object and product of his mother he was ‘part’ of the maternal body. In
relation to the masculine body and unconscious cathexis, then, one could
also speak of ‘femininity’ as implied in maternal femininity. Would not the
sexual act be structuring for the male subject to the extent that, putting into
play the repression of femininity, he would produce each time the coupure
that separates the man from his mother, while ‘returning’ to her the
femininity of his partner.
28 On the question of detumescence, cf. Lacan Séminaire 1967–1968. See also
‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Ecrits: A Selection and ‘Propos directifs
pour un congrès sur la sexualité féminine’, Ecrits, Seuil.
INQUIRY INTO FEMININITY 167
Translator’s notes
i The word jouissance is impossible to translate. Its meanings include:
enjoyment, enjoyment of property or privilege; pleasure; and the pleasure of
orgasm. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between jouissance and plaisir
(pleasure), which are two theoretically distinct concepts in Montrelay’s text.
ii The article la of la femininité is italicized in French: see J.Lacan, ‘Dieu et la
jouissance de la femme’, Séminaire livre XX: Encore, Seuil, 1975.
iii In Womanliness as Masquerade’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis X
(1929), pp. 303–13.
iv In the earlier version of this article, which appeared in Critique 278 (1976),
this sentence ends with ‘since it consists in confronting desire with a bodily
lack (which is carnal)’,
v Directed by Carl Dreyer, 1943.
vi The French is défoulement, a pun on the French word of repression: refoulement.
vii Nom puns on the French negative non and also refers to Le Nom du Père
(Name of the Father).
8
On the feminine and the masculine:
afterthoughts on Jacqueline Cosnier’s book,
Destins de la féminité
ALAIN GIBEAULT
You Isolde
I Tristan
No more Tristan!
No more Isolde!
No names,
No parting,
Newly perceived,
Newly kindled
Ever, unendingly
One consciousness…
Can the feminine be defined? And can we imagine a precise, univocal
definition which would make it possible to grasp the mystery of the ‘dark
continent’ to which Freud alluded? Freud’s approach is well known:
situate the feminine in the opposition of masculine and feminine and
separate out its antecedents in infantile sexual development on the basis
of other oppositions: between subject and object at the object stage,
between active and passive at the sadistic-anal stage, between masculine
or castrated genital organ at the time of infantile genital organization (the
stage of phallic sexual monism, when ‘maleness exists, but not
femaleness’). And Freud goes on to clarify:
It is not until development has reached its completion at puberty that
the sexual polarity coincides with male and female. Maleness combines
[the factors of] subject, activity and possession of the penis; femaleness
takes over [those of] object and passivity. The vagina is now valued as
a place of shelter for the penis; it enters into the heritage of the womb.1
All the same, we know that this sequence of stages, which could be
understood as an Aufhebung which both suppresses and maintains the
168
ON THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE 169
preceding oppositions, in fact corresponds to an ideal sequence in Freud’s
thinking, and that it is contradicted by the Freudian theory of phallic
sexual monism, which defines the masculine as the positive and the
feminine as the negative. A refusal of maternal femininity, the place of
the uncanny and of death, as Jacqueline Cosnier emphasizes in her book
on the ‘destinies of femininity’.2 A need for protection against the
primitive maternal imago, according to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, in its
situating of the whole of female sexuality ‘under the sign of lack’, ‘lack of
vagina, lack of penis, lack of a specific sexuality, lack of an adequate
erotic object, lack of her own capacities invested in the self and necessity,
ultimately, of “lacking” a clitoris’. To these may be added the relative
lack of a superego and of capacities for sublimation. On the other hand,
the boy’s sexuality is ‘complete’: he possesses an adequate sexual organ, a
specific sexuality from the outset and two erotic objects for the two sides
of the Oedipus complex.3
This is the conception of masculinity and femininity which leads Freud
to understand the refusal of femininity at the origin of interminable cures
as a ‘biological bedrock’. Jacqueline Cosnier’s aim is to conceive of this
refusal, this repudiation, as a ‘psychological bedrock’, which comes down
to understanding femininity not as a negative notion, which would
confirm an acceptance of powerlessness, but as a positive and intelligible
notion.
It is this positive approach to femininity which I want to clarify here,
starting from a number of themes taken from Jacqueline Cosnier’s recent
work: primary identification with maternal femininity; female masochism
and phallic and/or genital logic. This will be a way of considering the
integration of the feminine body in more depth, not so much by
emphasizing female sexuality on its own, as by studying the feminine in
its articulation with the masculine, in both men and women, and
beginning with questions of identification and the drives.
1. The primary identification with maternal femininity
We must first of all consider the opposition between masculine and
feminine not just as the end-point of a course of development, in this
case as the result of sexual maturation at puberty which would give its
full meaning to the difference of the sexes, but as the very principle of
this development, at the moment of the Freudian object stage and the subject/
object opposition. This assumes, first, that we think of this development
less according to a genetic sequence, in the sense of a succession of
phases, as we might think from a first look at Freud, obeying a linear
causality of the past over the present, than as a metapsychological
sequence: in this case, the reality of this passage from one stage to
170 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
another is indeed attributed to biological maturation, which at a
predetermined moment arouses activity of more or less significance on
the part of an erogenous zone; but it is secondary in relation to the
history of the conflict installed at this point, and in relation to the deferred
effects which introduce a retrospective causality of the present over the
past. Second, we have to distinguish the masculine-feminine opposition
from the male-female opposition (or rather, as Cosnier, following
Christian David, reminds us, from the opposition of maleness and
femaleness):4 in other words, distinguish between the psychical representation
of the body—which is more a fantasmatic body than a real body, a body of
drives which privileges the felt and the not immediately figurable—and
the body that is objective and spatialized according to anatomy, based more
on vision and the external apprehension of sexual difference.
This opens up a perspective whereby masculine and feminine are
relative to what is lived in terms of identifications and drives, which
leaves a space for a psychical topography, rather than deriving only from
the perception-consciousness system. This does not rule out taking
account of the consequences of the objective apprehension of sexual
difference (as we know, Freud accords major significance to vision in the
organization of the castrastion complex), but a psycho-sexual approach to
masculinity and femininity requires that this dimension not be the
primary one.
From this point of view, the opposition of masculine and feminine is
contemporary with primary identification, of which Freud says first, in
The Ego and the Id, that it involves an ‘identification with the father in his
own personal prehistory’, only to correct this in a footnote and say ‘with
the parents’.5 This is a movement of interiorization which follows the
two periods of the organization of auto-erotism: first, the period of a
primordial ‘sense of oneself, of a primitive reflexivity of the body that
correlates with the hallucination of satisfaction and the double reversal of
the drive; the reversal into the opposite, in the passage from passivity to
activity inherent in hallucinatory satisfaction, and the reversal onto the
subject’s own self, in the passage from object to subject, are evidence of
this primary identification with the mother, with her femininity. In this
way, a rhythm between inertia and constancy is installed, relative to the
mother’s function as protective shield, which progressively enables the
child to experience itself and not to figure itself as a unity distinct from the
mother, to feel the limits of its body and the lack which could be
fulfilled: thus the child is in a position to cathect its vital functions and
erogenous zones as the mother does, in spite of the juxtaposition of
extreme and discontinuous sensations. At the moment of the ‘object
stage’, contemporaneous with the perception of the mother as a total
object and her differentiation from what is non-mother, this ‘sense of
ON THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE 171
itself becomes a ‘representing itself’ correlative with primal repression, in
other words with the anticathexis of hallucinatory satisfaction and the
displacement onto the object of experiences of pleasure-unpleasure
linked to the satisfaction of needs.
In this context, Cosnier says that ‘the feminine identification is the
synthesis of primary identification and the secondary identification with
the differentiation of ego/non-ego resulting from the homosexual
investments that precede the recognition of sexual difference…and sexed
identification’.6 Is it a question of a feminine identification or already of a
bisexual identification in which the interiorization of the difference
between masculinity and femininity is correlative to the psychical
bisexuality of the mother? The censure of the [woman] lover7 or the
alpha function of the mother8 linked to her ‘capacity for daydreaming’
are some of the ways of designating the presence of an internal third
person which the mother transmits to her child, by giving a functional
meaning to everything in bodily contact with her child which involves a
pleasure whose cause must be unknown; in other words, what the child’s
body represents for her unconscious.
The differences between presence and absence, between good and
bad, and between the inside and the outside are thus correlative both
with the primitive differentiation between what is mother and what is nonmother, and with the difference between masculine and feminine within
the mother herself. Representations of the ambisexed mother or of the
parents combined would be evidence of this primary identification with
the parents, by condensing the two sexes into a single image: at the
origin of psychical bisexuality, this imago of the archaic mother would
refer to the image of a total integrity of the subject guaranteeing its
narcissism and its omnipotence; ‘proto-representation of femininity’, as
Jacqueline Cosnier puts it—which could also, it seems to me, be
considered as a ‘proto-representation of masculinity’, from the very fact
that this archaic image can figure receptiveness and joining in relation to
bodily experiences, at the same time as their breaking in and penetrating
action. This is perhaps what leads Cosnier to speak of secondary
identification in connection with the ego/not-ego differentiation, to
designate this primitive and condensed differentiation of masculine and
feminine, whereas secondary identification in the strict sense refers to the
successive and structuring post-Oedipal identifications, to the
differentiated images of the mother and the father.
How, then, should we understand the articulation between this
primary identification with the mother and the early constitution of a
core of gender identity, as Robert Stoller has succeeded in defining it?
From this point of view, the boy and the girl would follow an identical
path, whereas we know that gender distinctions are acquired very early.
172 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Around the second half of the second year, the child can identify itself
and others as male or female, through a process where psychological and
social factors operate more than anatomical factors.9 Belief in being a boy
or a girl precedes the organization of sexual difference and does not
contradict the attribution of a penis to every human being.
For Freud, while the fundamental riddle spurring on the child’s
‘instinct for knowledge’ was often the question of the origin of babies, he
did not put aside the idea that gender [genre] distinction, the division of
the human race [genre] into two sexes, represented a major problem to
solve, necessitating the construction of ‘sexual theories’.10 As we know,
the phallic phase and the theory of castration constitute what is at issue in
these researches during childhood: we can suppose that the primary
identification with the other, as a movement aimed at the narcissistic
identity of the sexes, and the accession to gender distinction, are the two
elements which, through their dialecticization, open the way to the
organization of sexual difference, to the moment of the identification of
the sexes, to their delimitation according to their respective psychical
characteristics.
This involves giving up the early undifferentiated representations and
identifications, which are then considered to be inappropriate in relation
to gender, and the recognition of the limits imposed by the other sex.
The development of sexual identity implies coming out of this original
matrix where all sexes are possible, and elaborating for each sex its wish
for the prerogatives of the other sex: penis envy for the girl, envy of
reproductive capacities for the boy. This is one of the main destinies of
primary femininity, and for both sexes.
2. Female masochism
At this level, the integration of maternal femininity which is analogous in
the two sexes is relative to primary masochism, as a cathexis of pain
related to hallucinatory satisfaction; in other words, as investment of the
rupture of pleasure/unpleasure, jouissance/suffering, hallucinated pleasure/
pleasure received. [Jouissance refers to a more intense and erotized
excitation than pleasure—Editor’s note.] The primary masochism of
which Freud says that it ‘still has the self as its object’11 is identical here to
primary sadism, for if one opens the way to auto-erotism, the other
opens the way to the object. Freud has a tendency, as we know, to
sexualize these ‘pairs of opposites’. In 1905, in the Three Essays, he was
writing:
It is…a suggestive fact that the existence of the pair of opposites
formed by sadism and masochism cannot be attributed merely to the
ON THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE 173
element of aggressiveness. We should rather be inclined to connect the
simultaneous presence of these opposites with the opposing
masculinity and femininity which are combined in bisexuality—a
contrast which often has to be replaced in psychoanalysis by that
between activity and passivity.12
We can now understand how these masculine/sadism/active
connotations opposed to feminine/masochism/passive are at the origin of
the Freudian description of feminine masochism—not in the woman, but
…in the man! Feminine masochism because, as Jacquline Cosnier
reminds us, masochism is for Freud ‘characteristically female’: its features,
‘being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth’13 would go back to
an identification with the mother in the sexual act. Cosnier insists in her
work on separating feminine masochism from femininity as such, and she
sees in it a deferred effect of primary masochism ‘inseparable from the
early relationship’ to the mother, and valid for both sexes. This involves a
fantasmatic compromise between ‘the desire for fusion effacing the
difference from the mother, and the desire for separation which would
make it more extreme’14 which, in the deferred effect of the infantile
neurotic organization and puberty, would pick up again the issues
involved in primary identification and primary homosexuality.15
This is a point of view not so far away from the one presented by
Florence Bégoin-Guignard in a lecture on ‘The Cat’s Smile’. On the
other side of the regressive aspects whereby ‘being castrated, or copulated
with, or giving birth’ are lived as pain and would be a result of the
exercise of paternal violence, we should acknowledge a more archaic and
forward-orientated dimension of masochism, where boy and girl would
have to take on the loss of the first object, enjoy the penetration of the
maternal penis (early genital instincts) and introject the mother as a
protective shield. The first period of femininity would be inseparable
from the fantasmatic integration of masochism, as a libidinal co-excitation
of receptivity.16 For her part, Jacqueline Cosnier also emphasizes the
positive dimension of feminine masochism as an acceptance of passive
desires which enables a disengagement from the fantasmatic dangers
linked to childhood powerlessness and the narcissistic wounds of the
needs of dependency. The struggle against passivity, on the other hand,
would be evidence of the impossibility of integrating feminine
masochism as a component in auto-erotism, and would entail the risk of
a fatal masochistic ascendancy.
The question then arises as to what would then be the interest of
maintaining the concept of ‘feminine masochism’, since in this
perspective it goes back to primary masochism. In addition, to sexualize
masochism in this way would be to bail out the Freudian affirmation
174 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
which makes masochism ‘truly feminine’.17 But as we know, Freud
himself admits that ‘the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine”…are
among the most confused that occur in science’,18 and that neither
anatomy nor psychology can succeed in specifiying their connotations.
Anatomy and biology may perhaps be able to characterize what is
masculine or feminine through the difference of genital organs and
reproductive cells, but biological bisexuality forbids the determination of
pure masculinity or pure femininity.
Psychology is in no better a position, for Freud, for ultimately the
reference to activity and passivity is not finally conclusive. He himself
often had recourse to the opposition of active and passive to determine
the masculine and the feminine: he even calls it an ‘essential’ meaning,
‘the most serviceable in psychoanalysis’.19 But in his lecture on
‘Femininity’, he ends up criticizing this assimilation, which is not
confirmed in either the animal or the human world. As he himself says in
relation to human sexual life, there is a lack of conformity between the
two oppositions, for both in what is sexual in the narrow sense (in
suckling, for instance) and in what is sexual in the wider sense (social
life), activity is not foreign to the female world. Freud does for a moment
speculate that femininity could be characterized not by passivity, but by
‘giving preference to passive aims’, since ‘to achieve a passive aim may
call for a large amount of activity’. But here as well the essence of
femininity slips away, because it is necessary to consider sociological
factors which ‘force women into passive situations’.20
The investigator is confronted with the same problem as the child, boy
or girl, seeking to understand sexual difference. In both cases, says Freud,
they are in the position of ‘purely thinking beings, from another planet’,
who would be amazed to find on earth ‘the existence of two sexes
among human beings, who, though so much alike in other respects, yet
mark the difference between them with such obvious external signs’.21
The invention of phallic logic and phallic sexual monism makes it
possible to install a momentary ‘order’ and to respond to this fundamental
question.
3. Phallic logic and/or genital logic
If boys and girls have similar destinies from the point of view of feminine
masochism and the primary identification with maternal femininity, none
the less the phallic logic contemporaneous with the Oedipus complex
introduces a difference between boys and girls in terms of phallic and
castrated, of more and less, of positive and negative. The distinction
between the sexes as a perceptual experience dating from the beginning
of life and entering consciousness around the age of two finds here an
ON THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE 175
‘understanding’ and a ‘conceptualization’, as an instinctual experience
more articulated with the ‘anatomical destiny’. A great deal is at stake,
because this involves confirming the disidentification with the archaic
mother and making possible the secondary re-identifications, while also
promoting the decondensation of the erogenous zones. Cosnier correctly
notes that the activity-passivity polarity which Freud wanted to
distinguish from the masculine-feminine polarity is sexualized, and comes
to be condensed in a more or less solid way into the phallic-castrated polarity.
It is the theory of phallic sexual monism which, through its link with
the anal organization of the libido, for both sexes only grants the penis
the value of a detachable ‘little one’,22 and refuses any possible meaning
to the difference between the penis and the female genital organs.
Primacy of the penis as occasion for feminine excitation—which thus
enters into a series of symbolic substitutions (faeces—penis—baby)23—
and displacements onto every bodily and intellectual activity, which
confirms the privileged role of this sexual organ in a semantic dimension
of the symbol. Primacy of the phallus, if we want to use the reference to
the Graeco-Latin term to emphasize the structuring function of the penis
in the differentiation of the sexes:24 the symbolic function of the phallus
serves to make explicit the bodily and sexual anchoring of gender
distinction and the central place of the castration complex, in conformity
with the syntactical dimension of the symbol (on this difference between
the semantic function and the syntactical function of the symbol, see my
article).25 The binary system of phallic/non-phallic simplifies the
difference of the sexes, but by the same token it has a function of
organization and reassurance for both sexes.
Does this theory refer to a reality or to a fantasy? As we know, Freud
attributes a primacy of the masculine to both sexes and does not think
that there can be any function for a representation of the vagina before
puberty: he thinks that in childhood the ‘vagina is still undiscovered by
both sexes’. In relation to the little girl, he clarifies: ‘It is true that there
are a few isolated reports of early vaginal sensations as well, but it could
not be easy to distinguish these from sensations in the anus or
vestibulum; in any case they cannot play a great part’.26 As for the little
boy, we should remember that in the case of Little Hans, Freud would
have let the boy move on, ‘if matters had lain entirely in my hands’: then
he would have been able to offer him a confirmation of ‘his instinctive
premonitions by telling him of the existence of the vagina and of copulation’.27
Are we dealing with ignorance or misrecognition? Freud always
thought it was a matter of ignorance, even though everything speaks in
favour of a misrecognition and effacement (repression or denial) of the
representation of the vagina in childhood. Following Melanie Klein,
Ernest Jones maintains more correctly the idea of an unconscious
176 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
knowledge of the vagina and a disavowal of maternal castration as a
defence against the representation of intercourse and penetration. From
this point of view the opposition between the clitoris, a masculine organ,
and the vagina, a feminine organ, would correspond to a defensive
modality characteristic of the phallic phase, with the aim for the little girl
of repressing genital pleasure.28 It is implicit in Freud’s formulations that
if the little girl’s reaction is so animated when she realizes that she does
not have a penis like the little boy, this is because it arises in a context
where clitoral masturbation has been intensified. The perception of the
absence of a penis comes to have meaning in order to repress a genital
excitation which, according to an interesting suggestion of Kurt Eissler’s,
is experienced in a much more traumatic way for girls than boys because
of the very possibility of orgasm before puberty.29 Correspondingly, the
abandonment of genital excitation cannot fail to bring about a fear of
losing all genital pleasure, which is what Jones noted in relation to the
little girl’s fear of aphanisis.30 Experience of actual genital loss made
possible by the early narcissistic experience of the loss of the illusion of
omnipotence: penis envy as experience of all or nothing anchors itself in
these experiences of loss and figures as manifest content, a compromise
solution in relation to the identificatory conflict with the mother. From
this point of view, penis envy would correspond not so much to a
primary envy, as Freud thought, as to a secondary and defensive one with
the aim of repressing the little girl’s properly feminine desires,
characteristic of a primary feminine phase.
As for the boy, the repression of the representation of the vagina does
enable him to set aside castration anxiety at the level of the positive
Oedipus complex, since he has nothing to envy or fear from his father;
but this theory also enables him to set aside all envy in relation to the
mother, in both her genital and her procreative role, since he is capable,
as is the mother, of satisfying the father and engendering children,
because of the vagina-anus equivalence.31 In relation to Little Hans,
Freud correctly observes that in the phobia of the fallen horse both the
death of the father and the mother giving birth are involved,32 but he
does not really explain his desire to give birth to children in the same
way as his mother, and the role of both this feminine identification and
his rivalry with his mother in his misrecognition of the difference of the
sexes. A refusal on Freud’s part of the maternal transference, as Cosnier
stresses, corresponding not so much to a refusal of femininity as to a
refusal of the femininity in his mother with the ‘discovery of the woman in
her with all its consequences, hostility and rebellion thenceforth let loose
against the mother’.33 Freud is incapable of analysing in Little Hans what
he refuses to see in himself: a blind spot which shows that for boys
ON THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE 177
castration anxiety, as the fear of losing the penis, is also connected to the
fear of losing the illusion of bisexual completeness.
A psychosexual destiny whereby boy and girl both find themselves
faced with the anxiety of losing a narcissistic state of unlimited
possibilities; the castration complex enables it to be worked through in
the direction of both differentiation and the setting up of objects. In this
process, anatomical and physiological destiny does none the less
determine differences in investment of the body. For the girls, bodily
experiences and their dimension of invisibility bring about what Cosnier
calls ‘a perceptual uncertainty as to what the girl sees and touches,
reinforcing her dependence on the gaze and the love of the other’,34 as
opposed to the boy, who is more capable of relying on the visible penis.
It is only at puberty that the girl will be able to rely on visible signs
(growth of the breasts, periods) which will come to confirm for her the
existence and integrity of a sexed body, to the extent that vision
facilitates the realistic representation of the genital organs: whence the
girl’s greater difficulties during the preceding periods in establishing the
meaning of her feminine identity, because of the invisibility of her genital
organs.35 And this is confirmed by the modalities of castration anxiety for
little girls during the latency period, which is particularly concerned with
the future successful functioning of her genital organs and with doubts
about this.
On the other hand, it is probably this dimension of invisibility which
can explain the more general and more diffuse erotism which
characterizes the female body. First, because of the displacement onto the
body in its entirety of the investment in the genital organs, in particular
in masturbation, so as to efface all reference to genital excitation and ‘the
imperfection’ of the female genital organs in comparison with the boy’s.
Also, because of that disposition for mothering to which this invisibility
testifies, which, according to Janine Chassguet-Smirgel, could promote
in women ‘the capacity to “convert” libidinal energy into parts of her
body which are not a priori erogenous zones’.36 It is also this disposition
for Carrying the child inside herself which, for Evelyne Kestemberg,
characterizes the modalities of auto-erotic investment of the female body
in a dimension of tender inflection which suits the organization of
primary homosexual relationships.37
From this point of view, the psychosexual destiny of the girl is easier
than the boy’s: while for Freud, the girl finds herself in a more difficult
situation than the boy because of the need to change erotic zones (from
clitoris to vagina) and object (from mother to father), it is precisely her
not having to disidentify herself from the maternal body (unlike the boy)
which promotes this primary homosexual movement for her and its
destiny in the Oedipus complex. As Kestemberg emphasizes, ‘this is just
178 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
what will enable her to love her father, by not completely losing sight of
the fact that being like her mother, she can replace her through her
disappearance in the murderous oedipal fantasy, without ceasing to love
her completely, since within herself, in this identical body, she loves
her’.38 This would probably explain why men are subject to more serious
and frequent problems of identity than women, since they have to face
up to the danger of identification with the woman, being castrated. It is
this differentiating problem in primary homosexuality which allows us to
understand why, in another theoretical context, E.Jacobson could
correctly note ‘that the experience of sexual identity is in no way limited
to comparisons between the genital organs of the two sexes’.39
Phallic logic is in fact an infantile sexual theory which, in its very
reference to the penis as organ and to anatomical destiny, aims at
repressing the narcissistic and objectal issues of the Oedipal period: as
much individual limits as incestuous and murderous desires. Through its
clearly defined oppositions, it also has the advantage of limiting the
regressive dangers linked to all that is condensed by what is invisible in
the maternal body, as an attraction towards the unknown and the absence
of differentiation.
The negative therapeutic reaction, to which Jacqueline Cosnier
accords considerable importance in her book, is inscribed in this phallic
logic, to the extent that Freud attributed it to a refusal of femininity on
the part of both sexes: penis envy for the woman and the revolt against a
passive or feminine disposition in relation to another man for the man.
With both sexes, the repudiation of femininity corresponds to a refusal
after the event of archaic dependence in relation to the mother, who has
made the child undergo both her domination, as ambisexed imago, and
the distress imposed by her femininity, correlative to her fertility, to
which maternal castration refers back. The biological bedrock is in fact a
psychological bedrock if, as Cosnier suggests, we link the refusal of
femininity to ‘unconscious desires for a destructive dispossession of the
maternal contents’: to desires for sterilizing the mother in her procreative
function.40
By contrast, genital logic is that which means to surpass the opposition of
masculine and feminine, figured in particular by the opposition between
activity and passivity, and dependent on anatomical destiny (having or
not having the penis), to discover the difference between masculinity and
femininity; this presupposes surpassing the struggle for a third object, for
a penis-thing which conceals the real aim of this wish: namely, as Maria
Torok emphasizes,41 the possibility, beyond being and having, of
discovering the right to act and to become—to think and fantasize, adds
Cosnier; the possibility of exercising an auto-erotism disengaged from
ON THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE 179
maternal control and correlative with the integration of the procreative
dimension of maternal femininity (a surpassing of the vagina/womb split).
This new logic of the unconscious brings with it two consequences.
Having the right to act assumes first of all being able to find a freedom in
the exercise of activity and passivity, which no longer define masculinity
and femininity but reappear in each polarity: at this level, orgasmic
experience bears witness to this freedom, in authorizing both loss and
reunion with oneself.42 This also makes it possible to become free from
the temptation of the positivism of univocal and systematic thinking,
which testifies to the alliance between anal mastery and phallic narcissism,
and to authorize the risks of multivocal and polysemic thinking—a logic
of difference where one of the terms necessarily refers back to the other,
without however leading to an infinite circularity.
The exercise of thinking in fact indicates the integration of psychical
bisexuality, in the sense of Christian David’s definition of it, as a ‘virtual
complementarity, potential in relation to the other sexuality, the other
psychosexuality…and by this very virtuality a reminder of incompleteness
linked to sexual specifications’.43 A feminine destiny which is also a
masculine one, to the very extent that the possibility of fantasizing and
sharing the sexual experience of the other sex ‘in a virtual form’ does in
fact enable there to be a sexual relation.
Jean Laplanche puts forward the hypothesis that genital logic would
promote the appearance of an open symbolization, which would
introduce a much more ambiguous symbolization than the one Freud
initially wanted to see there. Symbolic efficacity, in the sense of the social
efficacy of the symbol, would be calculated through the possibility for
recognizing and inscribing two, equally positive, symbols: for instance, in
the circumcision rituals of primitive societies, where the ‘symbolic
wound’ is as much a demasculinization as a defeminization, a taking on
of the biological sex and a reminiscence of the ‘powers’ of the other sex.44
But can phallic logic, then, ever be totally surpassed by genital logic?
For Jacqueline Cosnier, it would be a matter of letting the two
conceptions coexist as the results of two different logics present in us as
logics of the unconscious.45 I would tend to think, as she does, that we
are never finished with negotiating the castration anxiety, and that to
imagine that a genital logic has been fully reached would assume that the
unconscious had been tamed forever. But we know that the recognition
of the unconscious is an asymptotic work, which is directed less towards
opening it totally than towards re-establishing a circulation between the
psychical systems.
Cosnier draws the lessons of this ‘bisexual mediation’ (in Christian
David’s phrase) for analytic practice, and tries to identify the figures of
femininity and masculinity in the attitudes required for this work: if free-
180 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
floating attention can be likened to primary maternal preoccupation, it
can only be illusory to want to pin down immediate and infra-verbal
communication, as opposed to mediated and verbal penetration of the
material, to the categories of femininity and masculinity. On the
contrary, the analyst’s psychical bisexuality assumes, as she stresses, ‘a
relationship between paternal and maternal identifications, feminine and
masculine representations, which privileges their fertility, rather than an
opposition in terms of alternatives’.46 The patient’s identification with the
function of the analyst is thus an identification with this play between
receptiveness and penetration, where the conditions of analysis (free
association and the demands of the frame) echo the conditions of a work
of symbolization.
In this light, what connotations for defining masculinity and femininity
should be retained? While the criteria and manifestations can vary
according to periods and places, we might think that a universal
representation reappears in the metaphorization of bodily experience in
terms of desire to penetrate and desire to be penetrated.47 This difference in no
way confirms the oppositions of activity and passivity or sadism and
masochism, which, on the contrary, are regressive and fixed modalities of
it. The integration of the masculinity/femininity polarity, as source of a
free functioning of symbolization and creativity, has as its essential
condition for both sexes—and Cosnier has the merit of reminding us of this
—the surpassing of the anxieties and terrors inspired by maternal femininity
in an articulation, and not an opposition, between the visible and the invisible.
Notes
Translated by Rachel Bowlby
1 Sigmund Freud, ‘The infantile genital organization’ (1923), in SE 19, p. 145.
2 Jacqueline Cosnier, Destins de la féminité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1987), p. 47.
3 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, ‘Freud et la féminité: quelques taches aveugles
sur le continent noir’, in Les deux arbres du jardin (Paris: Editions des femmes,
1988), p. 56.
4 See Christian David, ‘La Bisexualité psychique: Eléments d’ une reévaluation’, in Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 39 (5–6) (1975), pp. 713–856.
[‘Maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ are given in English in the text, in parentheses
after the words ‘virilité’ and ‘femellité’. The sequence of three oppositions:
‘masculin-féminin’, ‘male-femelle’, and then the English ‘male-female’,
indicate the lack of symmetry here between the two languages, which is a
constant problem for translation. ‘Masculin’ and ‘féminin’ are wider terms
than ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, while ‘male’ and ‘femelle’ have more
directly biological meanings than ‘mâle and ‘female’—Translator’s note.]
5 Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), in SE 19, p. 31.
ON THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE 181
6 Cosnier, p. 85.
7 See Denise Braunschweig and Michel Fain, La Nuit, le jour (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1975). For Braunschweig and Fain the idea of the
censure of the woman lover refers to the function of a receptive and
alternative mother who would also be able to become a woman lover open
to the wish of the father. This evolution would be accompanied by a
censure of the erotic representations shared with the infant, which would
thus help the latter organize a positive repression process.
8 Cosnier, p. 53.
9 For Robert Stoller, the constitution of a ‘core of gender identity’ (in other
words, being male or female) depends on three factors: the anatomy and
physiology of the genital organs; the attitude of the parents, of brothers and
sisters, of peers, to the infant’s gender role; and a biological force that can
more or less modify the action of the environment (see Robert Stoller, Sex
and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity (London:
Hogarth Press, 1968), especially pp. 72–4). The experience of children born
with no penis or no vagina and brought up respectively as boys or girls
shows that the anatomical factor is not essential, and that parental attitudes,
especially the mother’s, operate more strongly in connection with the
child’s sex. This presupposes accepting that there exists from the outset a
primary destiny which is different for boys and girls and that the preOedipal phase is not identical for the two sexes.
10 See Freud, ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction
between the sexes’ (1925), in SE 19, p. 252, note 2.
11 Freud, ‘On the economic problem of masochism’ (1924), in SE 19, p. 1.
12 Freud, ‘Three essays’ (1905), in SE 7, p. 160. The reference to activity and
passivity was a 1915 addition, whose final formulation dates from 1924; in
other words, the period of ‘The economic problem of masochism’.
13 Freud, ‘Economic problem’, (1924), p. 162.
14 Cosnier, p. 93.
15 If primary identification is organized in the mode of the identical, primary
homosexuality enables a first movement in the direction of alterity through
its tender inflection, and is thus organized in the mode of resemblance. See
further ‘Homosexualité et identité’, Les Cahiers du Centre de Psychanalyse et
du Psychothérapie, 8 (1984).
16 See Florence Bégoin-Guignard, ‘Le Sourire du chat: Réflexions sur le
féminin a partir de la pratique analytique quotidienne’, in Bulletin de la
Société Psychanalytique de Paris, no. 9 (1986), pp. 3–18, and ‘A l’aube du
maternel et du féminin: Essai sur deux concepts aussi évidents
qu’inconcevables’, in Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 51 (6) (1987),
pp. 1491–503.
17 Freud, ‘Femininity’ (1933), in SE 22, p. 116.
18 Freud, ‘Three essays’ (1905), p. 219, note 1.
19 Ibid., loc. cit.
182 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
20 Freud, ‘Femininity’, p. 116. Freud maintains an equally critical position on
this assimilation of masculine-active and feminine-passive in Civilisation and
its Discontents (1930), in SE 21, p. 105, note 3.
21 Freud, ‘On the sexual theories of children’ (1908), in SE 9, pp. 211–12.
22 Freud, ‘On transformations of instinct as exemplified in anal eroticism’
(1917), in SE 17, p. 128.
23 Ibid., pp. 127–33.
24 See Jean Laplanche, Castration, symbolisations (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1980), pp. 56–8.
25 Alain Gibeault, ‘Symbolisme inconscient et symbolisme du langage’, Revue
Française de Psychanalyse, 45 (1) (1981), pp. 139–59.
26 Freud, ‘Femininity’, p. 118.
27 Freud, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy (‘Little Hans’) (1909), in SE
10, p. 145.
28 Cosnier (Destins, p. 43) rightly notes that Freud’s insistence on comparing
‘the male member and the laughable little clitoris enables a withdrawal of
any value or meaning from the difference between the little boy’s penis and
his father’s’. Whence we can see that a masculine scientific theory about
woman can refer back to a masculine infantile sexual theory!
29 See Kurt Eissler, ‘Comments on penis envy and orgasm in women’, in The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 32 (1977), pp. 65–7.
30 Ernest Jones, ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’, in The
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (VIII, part 4 (October 1927), pp. 459–72.
31 See Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, ‘Freud et la féminité’, note 3 above.
32 Freud, ‘Little Hans’, p. 128.
33 Cosnier, p. 47.
34 Ibid., p. 211.
35 See Edith Jacobson, The Self and the Object World (IUP: New York, 1964).
36 Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, ‘La Féminité du psychanalyste dans l’exercice de
son métier’, in Les deux arbres du jardin, p. 81.
37 Evelyne Kestemberg, “‘Astrid”, ou homosexualité, identité et adolescence’,
in Les Cahiers du Centre de Psychanalyse et de Psychothérapie 8 (1984), pp. 12–13.
38 Kestemberg, p. 23.
39 Jacobson, E. The Self and the Object World (IUP: New York, 1964).
40 Cosnier, p. 210.
41 See Maria Torok, ‘La Signification de “l’envie du pénis” chez la femme’, in
Recherches psychanalytiques nouvelles sur la sexualité feminine (Paris: Payot,
1964), pp. 181–219.
42 The opposition between clitoral orgasm and vaginal orgasm, which for
Freud again takes up the opposition of masculine and feminine, probably
testifies to the dominance of phallic logic and its defensive value. If the
vaginal orgasm, in its implied physical and psychical fusion and integration
of the clitoral orgasm, can be a goal for the woman’s psychosexual
development, none the less we know it should not be a criterion for the
integration of genital femininity, because it can acquire different values and
ON THE FEMININE AND THE MASCULINE 183
43
44
45
46
47
accompany, for instance, fantasies of castrating the man. The genital sexual
function should not, as much for the man as for the woman, be dissociated
from investment in an object since, for example, a weak object-investment
can promote an adequate genital experience, whereas a more significant objectinvestment can, on the contrary, inhibit the genital function and make it
more vulnerable to feelings of blameworthiness and anxiety. See Kurt
Eissler, ‘Comments on penis envy and orgasm in women’, in The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 32 (1977), pp. 39–47.
Christian David, ‘La Bisexualité psychique’ (note 4, above), pp. 834–5.
Jean Laplanche, Castration, symbolisations, p. 84.
Cosnier, p. 84.
Ibid., p. 168.
Kurt Eissler sees in this pair of concepts ‘the basic psychobiological entity’
enabling an appropriate and adequate definition of masculinity and
femininity, without however seeing in them characteristics specific to a
single sex. See ‘Comments on penis envy’, pp. 36–9.
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PART THREE
The representation of the body
185
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Introduction
In classical theory, masculinity and femininity refers to the representation
of the difference between the sexes centred on the recognition of
‘castration’. Femininity is grounded in the representation of a lack. The
questioning of phallic monism has lead to a consideration of the role of
the girl’s body schemata on her psychic apparatus.
In the early 1930s there had already been a recognition of the special
role of orality and anality for female sexuality, because of the receptive
nature of the oral cavity and because of the proximity of vaginal and anal
openings. Helene Deutsch considered orality to be the prototype of
genitality. The vagina takes over the role of the mouth. Coitus signifies
the restoring of the first relation of unity in which the distinction of
subject and object is annulled. Under the stimulus of the penis, the
vagina takes over the passive role of the suckling mouth, as was the case
in relation to the breast. She distinguishes between a masculine function
of the vagina, identified with the penis and active with secretions and
contractions like the penis, and ‘the truly passive, feminine attitude of the
vagina [,] based upon the oral, suckling activity’ (Deutsch 1946:170).
A special place is also given to orality in feminine development by
Hans Sachs (1929). He describes oral desires directed towards the father
stemming from a ‘regression to the oral level, without relinquishment of
the Oedipus object’. This tendency to incorporate the father orally ‘is a
consequence of the vaginal sensations now dimly felt for the first time
and displaced to the mouth because they can find no satisfaction in the
region of the vagina, which the child has not yet discovered’ (p. 45). He
suggests that these oral desires are a regular stage in their development
through which men do not necessarily pass, and contribute in girls to the
formation of the superego through the introjection of the frustrating
father.
Marjorie Brierley suggests that the female genital impulses which
appear during suckling constitute a specific instinctual determinant in
feminine development, although she adds that ‘what would seem to be
187
188 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
specific to women is not any psychic drive as such, but the balance that
has to be achieved and maintained in order to produce an integrated
feminine personality’ (Brierley 1936:164).
Klein writes that the girl’s Oedipus trends are to a far greater extent
under the dominance of oral impulses than are those of the boy, and that
this greater tendency to take in, to introject will mean that the woman’s
superego is more severe than the man’s. This view is in complete
opposition to Freud’s, for whom the woman’s superego was weaker due
to the fact that she did not have to fear castration, put an end to Oedipal
strivings and hence identify with a powerful figure. Lampl-de Groot,
taking up Freud’s view, had even asserted that ‘the purely feminine
women’ have no superego.
Lou Andreas-Salomé was the first to point out the place of anal
erotism in femininity, that vaginal pleasure is taken ‘on lease’ from the
cloaca. Freud himself wrote in New Introductory Lectures that ‘interest in
the vagina is also essentially of anal-erotic origin’ (1932). Marjorie
Brierley made a distinction between anal and urethral sadism, and wrote
that ‘it is necessary for normal feminine development that the oro-anal
system should be stronger than the oro-urethral’ (Brierley 1936:171).
Contemporary work has continued to emphasize the greater
connection between genital and anal factors in the girl than in the boy.
This is due to their proximity and reciprocal pressures (Kestenberg 1968,
Dolto 1965) and to the facility of a displacement from anal erotism to
feminine desire and of the representation of an internal sexual organ
(Duparc 1986). Oliner also discusses the importance of the anal phase in
the girl’s development and her problem in integrating anality into
genitality (1982). This connection is not necessarily facilitating.
I.Bernstein (1983) suggests that the proximity of the genital and rectalanal area contributes to confusion, uncertainty, and displacement of
attitudes about anality to the female genitals with consequent devaluation
of the female genitals. D.Bernstein (1990), on the other hand, writes that
the anal sphere acquires importance for the female because it is one in
which she is able to demonstrate control while she cannot control the
vagina. It carries the meaning of power which in boys is distributed
between the anal component and the phallic one, a point also made by Klein.
For Helene Deutsch the potential for maternity is central for women
and forms part of their sexuality. For Klein too, what is important for the
girl is not only having a vagina, but also a uterus and the potential for
having a baby. Psychoanalysts more recently have considered the
psychological impact of physiological events such as menstruation and
maternity (Bibring 1959; Benedek 1960; Breen 1975, 1989a; Pines
1990). This does by no means imply a one-to-one, unmediated
relationship between biological events and psychological events, since
INTRODUCTION 189
physiological processes will be lived differently by different women.
Dinora Pines also describes the way in which women unconsciously use
their body to avoid conflict, through the miscarriage of pregnancy, for
instance (1990).
The role of the female anatomy and physiology for ego-functions has
also been considered. Erikson was the first to write about the centrality of
inner space on females’ ego-functions (1964). He observed children at
play and discovered that girls and boys used space differently and that
certain configurations occurred often in the constructions of one sex and
not of the other. Sexual differences in the organization of play space
tended to parallel the morphology of genital differentiation. For instance,
where girls created house interiors with scenes within that interior, boys
built houses with protrusions, towers and exterior scenes. He concluded
that ‘a profound difference exists between the sexes in the experience of
the ground plan of the human body’ (Erikson 1964:273). Donna Bassin
(1982) proposes, following Erikson’s notion of the female predisposition
for the elaboration of inner space, that vaginal sensations and early
experiences of inner space contribute to the early constructions of a
category of experience, like phallic activity and its representations, which
serve as precursors for later cognitive processs. The existence of a bodily
schema for productive inner space goes beyond maternal/reproductive
functions and, she suggests, we are lacking language categories for the
feminine experience outside of woman’s biological function, her
traditional roles. Doris Bernstein (1990) discusses the role of specific
genital anxieties derived from the characteristics of the female genitalia
on her psychic development, in the same way that castration anxiety,
phallic fantasy is elaborated by boys.
It has been pointed out that Freud’s theory relies on the visual
experience of sexual difference, but that this is not the only means
through which the girl becomes familiar with her genitalia; by the time
of the recognition of the anatomical differences, she already is acquainted
with her femaleness and female genitalia from proprio-sensory
perceptions (Chehrazi 1986; Wilkinson 1991). The special problem
afforded the girl in her bodily similarity to the mother which is actualized
with puberty has been noted by a number of authors (Breen 1989b).
Women struggle with the lifelong task of identification and disidentification from the internal representation of their mother. A woman
has a dual and conflicting task of identifying with her mother’s female
capacities whilst at the same time emotionally separating from her and
taking over responsibility for her own body (Pines 1982).
The two papers in this section emphasize the bodily foundation of
masculinity and femininity. Doris Bernstein (1990) considers the role of
the representation of the body other than representation of ‘lack’, of
190 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
absence of the penis in feminine development. She suggest that the
characteristics of the female genitalia give rise to specific modes of
mastery and character structures. Mervin Glasser (1985) considers the role
of body representation in identificatory processes with the same-sex
parent. For Glasser, men’s identification with their father has as an
essential ingredient the bodily identification with the father, including his
penis. He suggests that the fact that the boy’s identification with the
father is based on bodily aspects while the girl’s equally necessary
identification with him rests on psychological attributes, will contribute
to differences between male and female sexuality.
9
Female genital anxieties, conflicts and typical
mastery modes
DORIS BERNSTEIN
In ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’ (1925), an essay that informs all
contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, Freud outlined two ways of
viewing anxiety. First, he introduced a new theory, signal anxiety;
second, he introduced a developmentally based hierarchical conception
of anxiety which has the concept of genital anxiety at its apex. Genitality
has become a watershed on the path to psychic maturity; the recognition
of the differentiation between maleness and femaleness, the attainment of
one’s own relative wholeness vis-à-vis the object and the tolerance for
conflict are the rewards of this achievement.
Freud outlined age/phase specific dangers with separation anxiety from
the maternal object or figure as the paradigm for subsequent anxieties; he
conceptualized phallic phase anxieties differently for boys and girls. For
boys, anxiety lay in the threat to their body integrity specifically in
castration anxiety (derived from separation from the penis); for girls the
danger lay in loss of love of the object (derived from separation from the
object). There was no recognition of the role that the girl’s own genitals
may play in her development or in generating anxiety. Nor does Freud
give any recognition to the differences that would follow from such
dramatically different formulations: his formulations define the boys’
anxieties as much more narcissistically oriented and define the girls’
anxieties as much more object-embedded.
One of Freud’s most brilliant achievements, and that which
differentiates psychoanalysis from other perspectives, is that it unifies
psyche and soma. Body and soul, mind and body had in previous
psychologies and philosophies been perceived as separated, if not outright
antagonistic. Freud achieved a conceptual unity, a comprehensive,
complementary interdependence between the body and the psyche; they
function as one. Indeed, he elaborated the profound and ongoing impact
of the body on the development and functioning of the psyche, on
character formation, on critical superego differences (Bernstein 1983) and
on relationships with others. Having recognized and included the body’s
191
192 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
role in psychic development, it is ironic that it should be just one, the
male, whose experience has become the model for human psychology,
and only the boy’s anxieties and developmental crises the model for all
human developmental crises.
At no time did Freud consider the impact of the girl’s own body on
her psychic development. He considered her genital awareness to be
limited to her preoccupation with the penis and her body image based on
its absence. In describing genital anxiety in ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and
anxiety’, genital is equated with phallus, and the girl’s genital is dismissed.
‘Where castration has already taken place’ (p. 125), anxiety occurs in
relation to the object. It is as if she had no genital of her own. Indeed,
Freud considered early childhood to be identical for boys and girls until
the phallic phase, when the girl’s discovery that she lacked the valued
penis became the central organizer of her psychic life. He considered her
own genitals inert, inactive, unknown, not to be discovered until their
maturation in puberty. This position was challenged quite early by
analysts. Horney (1924) considered the undiscovered vagina to be a
repressed vagina; Mueller (1932), originally a paediatrician, reported girls’
early genital interest. Reports of childhood masturbation abound in the
literature (see Clower 1976). Kestenberg (1956) has described the ebb
and flow of infant girls’ genital excitement; Erikson discussed the girl’s
‘inner space’ (1964) as her preoccupation with her inner genital. More
recently Stoller (1968) and Money and Ehrhardt (1972) have
demonstrated that gender identity is established long before the phallic
phase and that there is no evidence to sustain Freud’s position that the
little girl considers herself ‘un homme manqué’. Despite these observations
about little girls’ genital awareness and interest, their genital anxiety has
always been described as ‘castration’ anxiety, a legacy of Freud’s earlier
formulations.
If we do agree that the body is centrally involved in children’s psychic
development, it seems appropriate that the girl’s body, her experiences
with it and conflicts about it are as central to her development as the
boy’s body is to his. As the bodies are different, the nature of the
resulting anxieties, the developmental conflicts, the means of resolution
and many of the modes of mastery must of necessity be different as well.1
These anxieties, conflicts and modes of mastery have a pervasive
impact on the resolutions of all childhood developmental tasks, the
achievement of separation-individuation, the development of autonomy,
the formation of the superego, and the critical identification and
resolution of the ‘Oedipal crisis’ (Bernstein 1983, 1989). A full discussion
of these issues is beyond the scope of this paper.
The issues surrounding girls’ and womens’ reactions to the penis, i.e.
penis envy and castration anxiety, are described, documented and
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 193
elaborated in the psychoanalytic literature. Full discussions abound. Here
I will try to separate out the two issues deriving from the role of anatomy
in the girl’s development. I will attempt to define and explore the impact
of her own genitals, assessing their centrality. I will discuss her reactions
to the penis only in so far as these reactions affect her integration of her
own body image and experience. While several authors (Keiser 1953,
1958; Barnett 1966; Montgrain 1983; Mueller 1932) have addressed
female genital anxieties, I am attempting to understand their role in her
psychic development, thus viewing her genitals to be as important to her
as the boy’s genitals are to him. While Roiphe and Galenson (1976) have
recently studied toddlers’ reactions to the sight of opposite sex genitals,
they have viewed their material from the standpoint of a ‘genital equals
phallic’ perspective and have not addressed the issue of integrating the
girl’s own genitals into her body ego. Their conclusions reaffirm Freud’s
phallic orientation, although placing the recognition of the differences
between the sexes at an earlier age. The timetable is significant since the
children studied were between eighteen and twenty-four months old, the
same age that Stoller (1968) places for the establishment of core gender
identity. Thus, this discovery of genital differences takes place in the
traditional anal phase or in the phase of separation-individuation. It is my
thesis that the task of integrating one’s own genital into one’s body image
interacts with these other developmental tasks and that some of the
anxieties the girl experiences at this time are the result of her struggles
with her own body experience. Generally speaking, the female has been
described as an open system and the male as a closed system (Kestenberg
1956). In this paper I attempt to explore some of the implications of this
formulation.
Access, penetration and diffusivity anxieties
The genital anxieties of girls are not nearly as focused and tidy as boys’
anxieties. The boy’s penis, with its clearly defined presence, contours,
visibility, sensations and vulnerability is quite clear. The girl’s genitals
differ in every respect. It is my impression, also noted by other observers
(Montgrain 1983; Keiser 1953, 1958), that these differences have
multiple effects on psychic structuring and forming mental
representations that have pervasive influences on female mental functioning.
I do not mean to suggest that ‘castration-like’ anxieties do not appear
in women; these refer to a host of fears and fantasies about lost, damaged
or missing parts of the body. I have found these ubiquitous in the
analyses of women. However, I have not found that they serve
exclusively or even dominantly to describe women’s genital anxieties. I
am proposing three terms, each of which contains several components
194 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
and references, a far more complex constellation than ‘castration’. Access,
penetration and diffusivity seem to describe several clusters of female
genital anxieties.
‘Access’ refers to several different experiences. The girl herself does not
have ready access to her genitals; this touches on many levels of
experience. She cannot see them as she and the boy can see the boy’s
genitals. This creates immense difficulty in forming a mental
representation of parts of her body in which there are most intense
physical sensations. The role of sight in forming mental representations is
critical; for example, it has been found that blind children show marked
developmental delay in forming body ego/self-images (Kestenberg 1968;
Fraiberg 1968).
In addition to the visual difficulty, she does not have complete tactile
access to her own genitals; she cannot touch and manipulate them in a
desexualized way as can the boy. Hence, she does not acquire tactile,
familiar and sensual knowledge of her body that is not forbidden or tied
to forbidden fantasies. Moreover, when she does touch her genitals, there
is a spread of sensation to other areas; wherever she touches, yet another
area is stimulated. Location shifts not only within the genital, from
clitoris to vagina, but to pelvis and to urethral and anal sensations as well.
This stimulation spread for the girl contrasts with that of the boy, in
whom stimulation focuses.
This spread of sensation leads to a second anxiety, that of difjusivity.
Development requires the child to define and articulate its body and its
world. Touching, seeing, controlling, manipulating and naming
(Kleeman 1976) are the equipment with which children build up mental
representations of their own bodies, the outer world and their power and
control over themselves, people and things. If, indeed, ego is at core a
body ego, and body ego is an essential reference to the outer world, the
diffuse nature of the girl’s genital has a significant impact on the nature of
her development. Montgrain (1983) discussed this diffusivity in adult
women; he noted a ‘general understatement of the overflowing capacity
of women’s sensuality that escapes the bind of language’. Further, ‘the
insufficient anchorage is an anatomical reality and has a correlative effect
on the symbolic level’ (p. 170). Language and imagery are essential for
women to build a symbolic world which can be controlled and managed.
Under stimulation, the entire apparatus of mind and body is mobilized so
that a mind-body interaction that underlies thinking can be reactivated
under any stress. It is extraordinary how frequently one hears, in
women’s analysis, complaints that when they are under stress, particularly
intellectual, they cannot ‘think straight’, their minds blur, they get
‘fuzzy’, or they experience an incapacity to articulate. One hears equally
often that, after an initial ‘blank’, they are surprised to find how much
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 195
they really ‘know’ about a given topic, and how much knowledge they
had ‘tucked away’. The ordinary senses, sight and touch, are insufficient
for girls at this stage of their development. They must rely on additional
means, which I will describe fully later as modes of mastery, to articulate
and integrate their genitals into their body image.
The third and central cluster of anxieties centres around issues of
penetration. The vagina is a body opening over which there is no control
over opening or closing as there is with the mouth and anus; girls feel
they cannot control access by others or by themselves. The fantasy of the
genital as ‘hole’ is based on the child’s experiences with holes in the
external world. They are, indeed, passive and inert. Little girls cannot
imagine their genitals’ functions and co-operation in coital and childbirth
experiences: the lubrication and elasticity of her organ is unknown. This
contrasts with the boy’s awareness of changes in his organ as part of his
daily experiences. The penis and testes respond visibly to temperature,
tactile and erotic stimulation. Girls experience genital excitement as heat,
or an itch or a discomfort, often without awareness of the genesis and
often without visible or tactile cause. It is frightening to have an open
hole into which things can come and go, and which there is no way to
close or open, and no control over access. A derivative appears in a
woman, who, angry at her lover, demands the return of her key, so that
‘he has no access to me’. Other openings, the mouth and anus, may be
drawn into efforts to master the genital.
One implication of the girl’s lack of control over access to her genital
is awareness that the access can put her into ‘penetration’ danger. Not
only can things go in and come out, but she fears harm from these things.
Girls fear damage to their little bodies from the exciting paternal penis.
And, very early, they fear damage to their bodies from the babies they
long to create.
Girls struggle with definition and boundaries. Boundaries provide
definition and immediate access. The imagined penetration carries not
only fear of harm but also arouses anxiety about the crossing of the body
boundary. Intercourse requires entry to the inside of the body which can
threaten newly established or confirmed body integrity.
Two additional anxieties arise during adolescence when the girl is
confronted with ‘wetness’ for which she knows no source (indeed many
adult women do not) and menstruation. ‘Wetness’ necessarily invokes a
regressive potential to all the anxieties and conflicts surrounding early
bladder and sphincter control, a full discussion of which is beyond the
scope of this paper.
It is important to consider the changed timetable for the discovery of
anatomical differences and the establishment of gender identity in order
fully to appreciate the impact that these anxieties about access,
196 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
penetration and diffusity have on girls’ development and the role that
they play in women’s psyches.
Stoller has demonstrated rather convincingly that gender identity is
established by fifteen to eighteen months of age. Roiphe and Galenson
(1976) have noted the recognition and reaction to genital differences at
approximately the same time. Hence the discovery and integration of
genital differences falls into an already established, though perhaps
rudimentary sense of gender identity. These developments take place
during the period of development classically considered the anal phase,
from Mahler’s standpoint, the phase dominated by striving towards
separation-individuation. In the realm of cognition, the rapid
development of language gives articulated, symbolic form to the
developing sense of self and world. In the families of many women with
whom I have worked, there is no specific name given to the female
genitals (see Silverman 1981; Lerner 1976). Phrases like ‘down there’,
‘boopee’, ‘hokee’ describe the entire genito-urinary anatomy. One
woman assures me that in her language (a sophisticated Indian dialect),
no word for the female genital exists whereas there is a word for the penis.
The integration of genital differences has an impact on all the
developmental tasks and particularly complicates the process of separationindividuation for girls. All the genital anxieties I have just described bring
unique problems to phase-specific struggles. The separationindividuation struggle is played out in two directions—in relation to the
girl’s own body and in relationship to her mother. This interplay affects
the girl’s efforts at mastery. It is my impression that the achievement and
maintenance of separation-individuation is the central development issue
for girls.
Female mastery efforts
This variety of specific female anxieties focusing on issues of access,
control and definition is central to the developmental task of achieving
individuation. There seem to be specific developmental efforts at mastery
that are typical in female development. These are different from the
mastery efforts in boys and not aberrations of them. Roiphe and
Galenson (1976) have noted differences in boys’ and girls’ reactions to
their observations of genital differences. The boys reflected the effect of
the genital emergence in their choice of those toys and play activities
which are usually considered typically masculine, and in the onset of a
mild degree of hyperactivity. Furthermore, their masturbation was
continued and fairly vigorous from then on.’ They describe this as ‘low
incidence of overt reaction’. By contrast, ‘all 35 girls in our research
sample showed a definite and important reaction to the discovery…and
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 197
eight…developed extensive castration reactions’ (pp. 46–7). First, I think
it is incorrect to describe these boys as having a ‘low incidence of overt
reaction’; it is more correctly characterized as a more uniform and
specific reaction. Their concern is clearly with the penis; their reaction is
active, stimulating, in control, self-reassuring and perhaps even
counterphobic. This is their attempt at mastery over anxieties aroused by
genital differences. The activity observed was paralleled by an increase in
identification with their fathers. Rather than characterize the girls as
having important reactions while the boys had none, it would seem more
accurate to describe these reactions as quite different.
The girl is confronted with a different task—she must comprehend,
integrate and locate what is beyond sight, touch, focus and control. I am
suggesting that she mobilizes specific mechanisms to perform this task.
The internal, spreading quality of her sensation quickly and
automatically arouses anal and urethral confusion. Roiphe and Galenson
report observing oral-regressive behaviour, anal-zone exploration and
masturbation. I view these turns to these zones not only as regressive but
also as a potential turn to modes of mastery. Manipulation, opening and
closing and control of access, holding in are all possible in these body areas.
The following material illustrates the ways in which our usual ways of
organizing material can distract us from other essential aspects. The
‘phallic equals genital’ formulation informs both Parens et al.’s (1976) and
Roiphe and Galenson’s (1976) work, masking the girl’s own genital
anxiety about being open and her need to feel in control. Parens
described this in his report of 2½-year-old Candy (pp. 88–9), who, after
exposure to sex differences, became markedly preoccupied with a hole in
her sock, troubled, distressed, tried to make the hole go away. When her
mother sewed up the hole, Parens described her as seeming relieved and
able to leave her preoccupation and join other children in play.
Following this incident, Candy, although previously toilet trained
began having accidents, in which she wetted and then suffered much
distress and shame. She then reached for and clung to a large doll, and
then showed concern about broken things and wanted only whole
crackers. She then ‘sought the help of her mother and staff to effect a
return of her toileting controls’ (pp. 88–9). This description was
considered by Parens to be ‘ample’ evidence that Candy was in the
phallic phase. What this seems to describe more accurately is that Candy
was preoccupied with a hole that she could not close, that this led to
regressive wetting that she could not control and anxiety about things
being intact. There is not reported in this material a particular fear of loss
of something or damage to her body that would warrant the
interpretation of phallic anxiety nor does there seem to be any
justification for describing this as her genito-urinary concerns, i.e. her
198 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
castration complex. They are not the same. After her turn to her mother for
help in regaining control, ‘ample genital masturbation emerged’ (pp. 88–
9). Anxiety aroused an array of reactions in Candy; mastery had to
precede the pleasure—here a much more complicated route than for the
boy, involving confusion, regression, loss of control, pain, a turn to others
before a resynthesis, including the genitals, permitted the emergence of
genital pleasure that was so readily, directly available to boys. Parens’
description seems to support the complexity of the girl’s task; ‘castration’
does not do justice to the richness of the girl’s experience.
Similar issues are illustrated in the dream of an adult woman during
analysis. This woman has particular difficulty in articulating her genital
experiences. Raised in a very strict Catholic boarding school, she was
trained to dress and undress without looking at or touching her own or
other girls’ bodies. The prepubescent and adolescent activities of self and
mutual exploration, mirror looking, etc., were all suppressed as were the
infantile sexual explorations in her repressive home.
She dreamt that there was a snake in her apartment; she was scared and
didn’t know where it was, feared that it would ‘touch her. There was a woman
psychologist in a wheelchair but the patient was not sure she could help since she
had some kind of illness or disability. I interpreted as follows: she was
frightened of having her husband ‘touch her’ sexually and she was
worried whether I, a woman whom she saw as a weak, disabled creature,
would be able to help her with her fear, which focused on the fact .that
she didn’t know where ‘it’ was. The patient, who had been quite
depressed and listless, came to the next session with the first smile seen in
two years of work, and with a twinkle told me of a sudden renewed
interest in the stock market, of some trades she had made in the
intervening day, of her contemplating buying a seat on a new exchange
that was opening that she would control, but not necessarily use herself,
and earn money by renting the seat to others who wanted to trade. Her
movement was clearly to a position in which she did not feel helpless,
but could control, manipulate and enjoy; clearly she resurrected an anal
position. To have focused on her perception of me as castrated and
disabled would have put the two of us together in a helpless heap. She
was afraid, not only of her husband’s penis, but of sex in her own body.
Would I be able to help her with the scary sex that she couldn’t see and
that could dart out from anywhere?
Like Candy, frightened by the invisible sexuality, she regressed to a
mode in which she had already established control (her old interest in the
stock market) and turned to an object (the analyst) to help her in
establishing not only control but pleasure. For Candy, for my patient, for
all little girls, this threatening temporary disorganization must be tolerated
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 199
by the mother, and the subsequent forward movement towards erotic
investment must be welcomed both by mother and father.
Debby, a 24-year-old woman in psychoanalytic therapy, demonstrates
a confluence of several of these issues. Unable to have sexual intercourse
for five years, following a half-dozen experiences in college that were
relatively successful but accompanied by some bleeding, she broke dates,
stayed at home and had eating binges. She described her genitals as a
‘mystery’ and felt that they were damaged, concretized in the memory of
a bicycle accident before menarche at the age of 12. She had fallen off
her bike into a split with vaginal bleeding. The accident and subsequent
medical examination were painful, but there was no medical damage.
Nevertheless, the memory came up repeatedly as proof of a damaged
state. She became sexually aroused on dates, but men tightened her
genitals and felt ‘no one can enter me, I am too tight’. Attempts at
intercourse were indeed unsuccessful. Her mother had warned Debby
against sexual activity until marriage so that she could have control over
the man. Her mother also told her not to buy the fur coat she wanted, to
wait and let a man buy her one. The therapist began to focus her
interventions on Debby’s being in control of her pleasures rather than
things being done to her or for her. A visit to a gynaecologist for a
diaphragm brought associations to worries that her hole is not big
enough to have anything go in and a disbelief that her vagina could
stretch to accommodate either penis or baby. She watched in the mirror
as she practised with the diaphragm, but still was anxious about not
seeing her ‘insides’. The therapist empathized with her longing to see but
encouraged her to define her sensations by feel and touch. Throughout
this period (about three months) there was a weight loss of about 8
pounds and a sense of stabilization about food, although neither had
come up for manifest work.2 The therapist interpreted her weight loss in
terms of her efforts to control her other opening, her vagina. The
therapist worked simultaneously on issues of separation from her mother;
Debby recognized her own difficulties in feeling separate from her
mother when there was disagreement between them. The confluence
occurred when she had successful, pleasurable intercourse, she in a new
position, on top (more in control). She longed to run and tell mother but
did not act. The focus on her control of her own body, her genital, led
her to integrate both sex and food with a sense of mastery and
separateness from her mother.
The material I have just described focuses on the efficacy of regression
and identification in achieving mastery over the elusive genital and the
contribution this can make in developing a sense of mastery. There are
other mechanisms girls use for dealing with the internal confusion, some
potentially considerably less adaptive. While all the mechanisms I am
200 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
describing here are also found in boys, it is because they carry an extra
burden for the girl in her development that I am emphasizing them in
this context.
Renunciation of sexuality (Jacobson 1964) is another mechanism utilized
by girls when confronted with sexuality and unsatisfactory pre-genital
development to support the new demand. The girl who renounces
sexuality often turns into a character type we often meet, who is her
boss’s right arm, her father’s nurse, a woman who has an intense but
desexualized relationship to (usually) an older man (Chasseguet-Smirgel
1970).
Another of the mechanisms for mastery of this internal body confusion
is externalization, elaborated by Kestenberg (1956). Onto the doll, which
is already a beloved baby and self, is projected erotic investment.
Kestenberg finds that play changes to genital-urethral preoccupation;
there is more bathing, wiping, examining in contrast to earlier feeding
and cuddling. Girls externalize onto other objects. They develop
preoccupation with manipulating and collecting crayons and pens
(sometimes father’s). While this preoccupation is considered to be a
manifestation of a penis envy response to genital differences (Roiphe and
Galenson 1976; Kestenberg 1956, 1968), I would emphasize a different
interpretation of the search for manipulable objects. I see this behaviour
as an extension of the need for concretization, control and mastery of the
undefined as demonstrated by the fantasy frequently found clinically: ‘I
have a penis, one will grow, it is hidden inside.’
Penis envy and fantasy penises can be conceptualized as extremely
adaptive fantasies in the girl at this time. Confronted with intense
sensations in the genital area, to see the boy’s penis and think, ‘ah, that’s
what causes these sensations’ is a sensible and imaginative fantasy that can
bring order to chaos. As with other childhood fantasies, it should be
reworked and absorbed in the process of normal development. The
presence and use of the fantasy varies. For example, an adult female
patient had a dream
I am riding in a car with a man and am growing more and more sexually
aroused. I look down at my crotch and see an erect penis. I think to myself,
‘how else will he know that I am sexy?’
A pregnant woman, who had just associated to penises said, ‘It’s just so
nice to think something solid that you can imagine is in there. It’s always
so vague to think about my vagina.’ The penis may become an object of
covetousness because its fantasied possession is a coherent, cognitive,
adaptive explanation for multiple-sensations. In fact, there are times
when it seems that ‘having a penis’ means having sexuality itself—as a
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 201
concrete, visible, boundaried word concept. Having a concrete image
and a word, i.e., language, is an essential part of the ego development
that children undergo at this time and the acquisition of language is
inherent and intrinsically linked to the child’s ability to manipulate
images and ideas. The fantasies which should be transient during the early
genital and phallic phases can become central and the girl can be unable
to absorb them. What should be transient becomes fixed, leading to
either manifest or covert phallic feminine organization and to a girl who
lacks access to her femininity.
A, an accomplished professional woman, always felt a fraud. Analysis
revealed the common unconscious equation of ‘brains equals penis’.
Intense envy coloured relationships with male colleagues who seemed to
her to be able to think and work easily and without conflict, and with
great conviction of the value of all their utterances. During a session she
described all that she admired and envied in a male colleague—his
height, his agility, his strength, his clear thinking, his clear lectures. She
complained bitterly how much she envied all these attributes. I pointed
out one significant omission that really differentiated them, namely his
penis, the lack of which in her experience gave her thoughts and lectures
a feeling of inauthenticity. She responded by saying she could never
relinquish her ‘phallic’ brain and her competitiveness; without them,
what would motivate her in her work? After a few minutes silence, she
reported an image of a baby sitting in a corner of a playpen: I asked her
what the baby was doing. Her response was that the baby was biting the
wooden bars; her mother often told her she had done that. I responded
by saying that I thought she was answering her own question; she didn’t
need a fantasy penis, she could ‘sink her teeth’ into a problem, she was
not lacking instruments for mastery.
An illustration of a woman’s concerns appears in the dreams of a 40-yearold woman in analysis who had been commenting upon her recent and
unusual lack of interest in sex, and complaining about her lover’s
frequent interest.
I have a wound on my hand. I have been bitten—several bites—but it’s not
bleeding. It becomes like a slash—I can see inside—the tissue, the tendon—
there is a skin graft done—two pieces in front, one in back of it—one from me—
one brown skin—it all fits beautifully—very clean and tidy—but the two men
helping are not being careful to be antiseptic. If they are not careful, there will
be infection. The next scene is funny. There is this machine examining the
inside of a toilet bowl—I think ‘hey, this thing is an X-ray machine’—I can
hold up my hand [she holds up the same one she used to illustrate the bite/
slash] and you can see the inside—then I put my head in front of it and you
can see the inside but what is clear are the lips, which seem very bright red.
202 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
This is a complex dream; I present it because of the many elements of
anxiety expressed. The bite, the dirt, the slash, the men who are not
careful, the machine which ‘sees’ but can be dangerous. As we can gather
from ‘it’s not bleeding’, the patient comments that she is menstruating at
this time. In addition, in both dream scenes, one can see inside; this
element repeats in relation to the hand wound, the inside of the toilet
bowl, again with the X-ray, the hand and the head. An analysis of all
elements is of course necessary. It would be an error to focus only upon
the obvious—the patient herself commented, ‘I know that the slash is
equated with the vagina—that’s so classic’ with little concern, affect or
conviction. My noting how frequently in the dream she was looking and
could see inside, brought forth more intense feelings. It is of note that
this woman, a physician, had recently been expressing worry about not
identifying organs correctly during surgery, an anxiety for which there
had been no reality base as her familiarity with anatomy is in no way
deficient. The patient had begun a menstrual period the prior day, was
‘casual about birth control and somewhat concerned about her fertility.
Her dream responds, ‘There is no blood, the bites are easily repaired,
how clean, how tidy! All is well.’ The dream illustrates the confluence of
material drawn into genital anxiety and the varied mechanisms attempted
to master it; prominent is her wish to see, which must be given equal
attention with the more familiar interpretation that she feels her genitals
are wounded. This (not incorrect but incomplete) interpretation leaves
the female in the helpless condition so often attacked by critics of
castration anxiety as central for women. That the very looking may be
dangerous (the X-ray machine) demonstrates that looking has taken on
the familiar dangers of infantile sexuality, to be sure, but again to focus
only on the dangers of looking does injustice to her attempt to master
her anxiety. Her need to see and know what is inside must be dealt with
as positive and adaptive; this woman suffers from feeling insufficiently in
control. She often complains (in this session too) that her brain melts and
she cannot keep ideas straight. Being able to see and identify is an
important element of mastery.
The following week, this same patient presented another dream, this
one illustrating the need for control over access:
I had one of my house dreams [these were varied]. There is a big old fashioned
kind of Victorian house with windows all around—like a porch—not like Joe’s
father’s—modern and sleek. I am worried about getting locks, it’s so open all
around. Then I get the locks and somehow you have to put the locks in a fruit,
it turns into a puddle, muddy dirty puddle.
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 203
Here the beautiful house is in danger as a result of its lovely, gracious
openness. Anxiety over being able to secure entry (the lock) appears (the
house is not like the man’s). The genital reference is made clear by the
fruit, which she describes as very soft and juicy. The fruit turns into the
dirty, muddy hole, i.e. the genital is experienced in anal imagery, but that
is where the lock is in this patient’s dream, i.e., where the sphincter has control.
The confusion of anal and genital has long been noted in analytic
literature. The vagina is often experienced as dirty, due to the internal
location which easily leads to equating the vagina with the rectum. The
confusion is reinforced by the diffusion of sensation, amply demonstrated
by cloacal theories of childbirth. While all of this is familiar to us, what I
wish to introduce as an additional and important factor for the female is
that the anal sphere is one in which the female has been able to
demonstrate ‘control’. It therefore carries meaning of power which, in
boys, is distributed between the anal component and the phallic ones.
While girls have long been described as neater, cleaner and more easily
toilet-trained, I am proposing that an independent source of this
development derives spontaneously from the girl’s need to master and
integrate genital anxieties, that the internal nature of the genital connects
with anality, and genital excitement redoubles her need to exercise
control. This occurs independently from influences of the relationship
with her mother.
Inherent conflicts
In the preceding discussion of what I consider to be typically female
efforts at mastery of genital anxieties, I did not elaborate the inherent
conflicts involved in each attempt at mastery. It is essential to realize that
these efforts are not simple, harmonious experiences. One predominant
element, the reliance on the mother, is occurring within a relationship
fraught with difficulties inherent in the age. A relationship of trust is
essential: the girl must rely on her mother’s reassurance that her genital is,
indeed, inside (Keiser 1953). ‘Seeing is believing’ gives concrete reality to
boys’ definition whereas girls must integrate their genital on a sense of
faith; she must ‘know’ it without evidence and must trust her mother’s
explanation.3
The girl’s need for her mother to help her master her genital anxieties
occurs during the same period in which the natural thrust of
development calls for a turn away from her in the service of the task of
separation-individuation. Viewed from a libidinal perspective, this is the
period in which children are struggling for ‘control’ over their own
bodies and often are engaged in a power struggle with their mothers.
Two of the specific genital anxieties repeat and intensify anxieties already
204 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
inherent in development conflicts. The turn to mother threatens reengulfment, requires a ‘yes’ (I am like you) when autonomous strivings
require a ‘no’. Hence, the ambivalence and intensity of battles between
mother and daughter, the clinging and fighting, are fuelled from multiple
sources long before rivalry for father is an issue.
Not only must the little girl turn to her mother in her mastery efforts,
she also must, like the little boy with his father, form an identification
with her as a female. Kleeman (1976) has pointed out the importance
role labelling plays in organizing the child’s gender identity, and language
begins to play a major role in organizing the world during this same
period. This very organizing function, that of being female like mother,
important for the integration of genital and gender experiences, threatens
the task of individuation, which requires being different from mother.
Moreover, every identification is built upon older experiences (Reich
1954), so that the resurrection of the earliest, symbiotic primary
identification and diffusivity threatens the ego’s struggle for definition.
This reverberation between genital anxieties and symbiotic anxieties
contributes to the girl’s difficulty in articulating boundaries; diffusivity
and control issues are pervasive.
The interaction between control of her body and differentiation from
the mother is demonstrated by a woman who dreamt
of a building in which she was anxiously trying to secure the doors and
window, barring entry.4
The associations merited the interpretation that the invasion (her dream
word) she feared was genital and that she was trying to secure control
over genital entry. Associations to a rape during adolescence confirmed
the interpretation and the patient felt relieved of a sullen recalcitrance
that had characterized her mood during several sessions. She said she
really felt ‘understood’ and left feeling lightened. She opened the
following session with ‘I can’t give you any credit for my feeling better,
you’ll make it all yours’, a theme often demonstrated in this treatment by
chronic complaints that mother always took over her feeling.5 She again
described her inability to have anything good because mother takes it,
feeling it more than the patient herself. Associations to the recent illness
of her boyfriend reiterated her blurring of boundaries in that his pain
became her pain. The whole issue of psychic boundaries flowed from the
anxiety about body boundaries.
While there has been a current trend, primarily in academic
psychology, sociology and among some psychoanalysts to idealize the
mother-daughter tie, it does not reflect accurately the struggles that
emerge in the analytic situation, where intense ambivalence seems to
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 205
predominate. The longing and fear of being one with mother parallel the
wish to be like her and both parallel the wish to be different. Whichever
way the girl turns at this point, anxiety is generated.
Derivatives of this position seem to present themselves in adult women
during pregnancy. A new genital anxiety confronts pregnant women and
one hears all the infantile anxieties; women fear damage to their bodies
from the forthcoming childbirth, they cannot imagine their body’s
participation and they fear the pain. They feel an urgency about being
close to their mothers but simultaneously push them away. They wish to
merge with their forthcoming infants but often structure their lives so as
to ensure not becoming immersed in the maternal experiences, as one
woman put it, ‘being lost in the swamp’ of motherhood. As in early
childhood, in pregnancy one witnesses all the inner confusion, the
regression to other modes of control (sometimes in work, sometimes
controlling husband or others by making demands), before some balance
of identifications and differentiation from their own mothers is integrated
with the physical experience. During pregnancy, fantasies of an internal
penis are resurrected as a concretization of the unknown experience. In
recent years, several women who have had ultrasound scans during their
pregnancies have been delighted about the concretization given by the
visual experience of ‘seeing’ their foetuses. Despite all the explicit
educational material available to women, the mysteriousness of what is
going on inside their bodies seems to me to reflect that early undefined
mysteriousness. One woman enacted the search for concretization by
looking closely into the mirror and finding, that if she looked closely, she
could ‘see’ something of her genital. Another revealed the use of a pen
for masturbation, describing the need and pleasure in defining her genital
experience.
In a case presented to illustrate some of the developing girl’s
difficulties, Silverman (1981) illustates the confluence of anxieties. Faith
demonstrates the symbolic use of the penis as an instrument of control
over what can come out of her body. If she had one of those, she could
see, touch and, although not manifestly stated, show her ‘overalls’. The
little girl, Faith, had a boot fetish (worn whenever she left home) and,
when excited, wet herself. At 6½ she was insufficiently differentiated
from her mother so that she was unable to attend nursery school.
Analysis of the fetish revealed two components: Boots was the name of a cat
whom mother continually threatened to send away because
periodically it went round the house spraying the furniture…living in
terror that she herself would be sent away for her own wetting, Faith
had contrived to keep Boots with her in one form or other at all times.
(p. 591)
206 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Recalling her wetting led to the second insight.
She had watched her mother watering the garden and had seen that
she controlled [italics mine] the stream with something, a nozzle, that
very much resembled her brother’s penis. If only she had had one of
those she told me, she would have been able to control [my italics] her
urinary stream and would have been able to avoid all her
consternation and misery.
(p. 591)
Silverman interprets this material as an example of penis envy and genital
confusion. After considerable work in this direction, Silverman made the
interpretation to Faith that she wanted what her brother Frank had.
Again I quote:
‘That’s right!’ she shouted, and she pounded the table with her fist. ‘I
want my overalls outside like he has. He can see his overalls. He can
touch his overall. I can’t see mine. I can’t touch mine. I don’t know
myself.’ After this the fetish was given up.
(p. 591)
I find this case an extraordinary example of the girl’s proccupations. Her
needs to have access, to concretize, to control and to retain her object are
all expressed in the boots. Here penis envy is clearly metaphor (Grossman
and Stewart 1976) for her own concerns over mastery through sensory
modes and demonstrates the interaction between body integrity and the
developmental task of individuation. While Silverman does not elaborate,
we can assume that the relinquishing of the fetish was accompanied by an
increment in psychic individuation and that she became more capable of
leaving her own mother as a result. Some resolution of conflicts over
mastering her own body diminished anxiety and enabled her to
relinquish dependency on an object (Boots/mother/penis), i.e., to effect
separation. Her anxiety over genitals that were beyond voluntary sensory
control kept her dependently clinging to her mother.
Mastery over the body is a central issue as toddlers attempt
individuation and autonomy. The issues I have been describing seem to
be central for little girls. While the separation-individuation struggle is
predominantly an issue between the girl and her mother, fathers play a
significant role that has been underestimated. Fathers have not been seen
as significant in the first two years of life; they seem to appear as ‘knights
in shining armour’ in the toddler phase and become fully important only
during the Oedipal phase.
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 207
Recent research finds infants particularly like the father’s low voice at
28 weeks; Mohaczy (1968) found a mild stranger reaction only where the
fathers were not actively interacting with their infants. Abelin (1971)
found precursors of attachments to fathers very early; all but one of the
infants studied recognized the father with a happy smile before six
months and all were firmly attached to their fathers by nine months. The
girls he observed attached themselves earlier and more intensely than
boys did.
In Abelin’s studies, during the toddler phase, most relevant to this
discussion, toddlers’ relationships with their fathers were markedly
different from those with their mothers. The relationship with fathers
were filled with ‘wild exuberance’; fathers appeared a ‘stable island’;
while mothers were ambivalently cathected. Fathers were not
experienced as rivals at a time when other children were experienced as
rivals for mother’s attention. A few weeks following the rapprochement
crisis, father images were evoked in play, stories and pictures when
children were distressed with their mothers. Abelin suggests the
resolution of the separation-individuation struggle might be impossible
for both mother and child without having father to turn to. Brooks and
Lewis’s (1979) findings that fifteen-month-olds were able to identify
their fathers from a picture, but none was able to identify the mother,
stresses the importance of difference in the forming of articulated images.
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1970) has recognized the importance of fathers to
girls in their attempts to separate from mothers. Viewing the struggle as
saturated with aggression, fathers emerge as those with power over
mother. In fantasy, the girl seizes the father’s penis to find power against
her image of the angry, controlling mother (created by the projection of
her own rage), and subsequently the tie to her father is coloured by her
guilt towards him for having castrated him. The research on early
development I described above suggests the existence of a more benign
relationship with her father (the stable island). The father as a reliable
resource is as important, if not more so, to girls as he is to boys, since
girls must rely more than boys do on others to effect separation. Since
her own anatomy cannot help her, the girl’s mastery requires a turn to
objects for both support and identifications. I will not here elaborate the
conflicts inherent in this relationship (see Bernstein 1989); at this early
stage it seems to be relatively non-conflictual for children of both
genders; I wish to stress the ongoing object embeddedness in the girl’s
development.
Vignettes from a two-year period of an analysis illustrate the
interaction between mastering female genital anxieties and individuation,
and the reliance on others to achieve this. Miss C dreamt
208 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
she was in her bedroom and there were two heavy doors to give her safety; but
high above was a small open transom window she could not lock, leaving her vulnerable.
This imagery, which I discussed earlier, is always expressive of multiple
anxieties including genital ones. In this case the genital anxieties of access
and penetration, and relationship issues involving an intrusive mother and
domineering powerful men converge in the attempt to achieve
individuation. The patient’s associations at this time led her to never
having privacy or being able to make her own decisions, and to her
cultural world in which men indeed had all the power and women were
expected peaceably to submit to all their wishes, including sexuality. To
interpret solely along the lines of her fear and helplessness about someone
entering would not be helpful because the issues involved individuation
and autonomy as well. Note that in this dream the patient is quite alone,
the only condition in which she has any measure of safety. During the
subsequent two years of analytic work, several themes were developed.
One of the prominent ones was what I (Bernstein 1979) have called a
forbidden identification with the powerful grandfather who lived in and
dominated her childhood home. This forbidden identification deprived
her of a satisfactory route out of the immersion with her mother and the
preparatory familiarity (Glover and Mendell 1982) that would help her
into a comfortable relationship with men. Some work on her fear of this
unconscious identification led to the transference dream that
she was driving her doctor’s car around, having a wonderful time, although
somewhat anxious that she did not have permission to take it.
This anxiety reflects both what I have called a forbidden identification
and Chasseguet-Smirgel’s description of the guilt-ridden sign of the
father’s power. The next dream that took place in that same room
illustrated her fear of being overwhelmed not only by a man but by her
own powerful sexual impulses: she dreamt that
the ceiling was wide open and everything could come pouring in.
The door, as image, reappeared following some interest in an appropriate
man during the analyst’s vacation:
‘A man is trying to get in the door, it is not locked. I turn to this woman in a
rage, screaming “Why are you not helping me?”’
A proper rage at her own mother, whose passivity in all things left my
patient unaided in her feminine development, was now alive in the
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 209
transference. As work progressed along these lines of interpretation, the
patient dreamt that
she was trying to get from one floor to another on an elevator, but there was no
control panel. She finally found a cleaning woman who helped her.
Association led to a maid who in childhood had washed the patient’s
hair, and, with further exploration, to memories that she bathed her,
including her genitals. My interpretation that she felt she had no control
panel but had to rely on others to master her body experiences finally led
to the concretization of these anxieties in a dream in which
a bicycle or motorcycle went from between her legs straight at her mother,
with all the overdetermination of that image. These themes in this
patient’s analysis illustrate several of the issues under discussion: the need
to feel in control of her own body sexually as well as in relation to
others, her need for a paternal identification to precede sexual
involvement and the need for her mother to support her in her sexuality.
The wish to control her own body (space) carries both referents of
psychic autonomy and body integrity.
There are implications for psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic
technique that have been implicitly suggested in the material that I have
presented: here I would like to make them explicit. Viewing female
anxieties as unique leads to a variety of issues central to the developing
self. The girl’s genital anxieties parallel other anxieties characteristic of
the early stages of development. One of the most important mechanisms
available to her is that of identification, itself a natural mode for both girls
and boys in mastering the developmental conflicts of the age. Turning to
her mother to help her master anxiety, she is faced with anxiety
emanating from the very identification she needs to consolidate. Anxiety
arises from conflicts over regression vs. progression; identification vs.
differentiation; dependency vs. autonomy; control vs. helplessness.
Unlike identifications with father, for both boys and girls, the
identifications with mother are dangerous because of the early
relationship which is resurrected when the more advanced identifications
are being made.
If one interprets the conflicts in these terms, the women will find
sources for mastering their anxiety and resolving their conflicts, a far
different aim from that of helping them ‘accept’ a castrated state and
settle for substitutes. Female resolution may lead to a wider range of
solutions than we are accustomed to seeing in the male; A reached
control over anality (money and entry, she will decide who can sit in the
210 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
seat she owns); B will ‘sink her teeth’ gleefully into many of life’s
problems and intellectual pursuits without feeling a fraud; D has taken
control over her own pleasures, sexual as well as others. All girls must
find a way of resolving the anxiety aroused by the necessary
identifications with their mother on whom they must rely far more than
is necessary for boys. This object embeddedness has long been considered
the hallmark of feminine character (Gilligan 1983).
Conclusion
I have tried to illustrate that girls’ genital anxieties derive from the
characteristics of the female genitalia and to identify some of these
anxieties. Her fears, anxieties and psychic fantasies must be explored in
relation to her own body in the same way that castration anxiety, phallic
preoccupation and fantasy must be elaborated for boys. As the nature of
the genitals and genital anxieties are different, of necessity, the
mechanisms for mastering them differ also.
Here, I have identified three interrelated anxieties: access, penetration
and diffusivity. I am suggesting that the girl’s experience with the
unfocused, open, penetrable nature of her genital creates difficulties in
forming mental representations of her body that have clear boundaries
and sharp definition. Further, I suggest that this unfocused representation
of the genitals complicates the formation of ego boundaries and a firm
sense of self, and contributes to both the mental and body issues of which
women complain; they describe mental ‘fuzziness’ in trying to think and
complain of fluid body images (see Lerner 1976).
Attempts at mastery include externalization, concretization, regression
and, unique to the girl, a greater reliance on others than for boys. She
must rely on trust, dependency and identification, quite different from
the boy’s directly sensory modes: visual, tactile, manipulable. This, in
turn, contributes to the object embeddedness of the girl’s existence, so
long an observed female characteristic.
The timetable for integrating gender and the body into the emerging
self is complicated because she must turn to her mother at the time that
development of autonomy requires a turn away from her. Critical
identifications with her father are as important to the girl at this stage as
they have always been considered to be for boys. Fathers have a dual role
at this point; the girl requires both his affirmation of her femininity and
his welcoming identifications with him.
It is not possible here to discuss the girl’s Oedipal phase (see Bernstein
1989), only to suggest that the fantasies at this time are an overlay of the
earlier ones and the preferred modes of mastery again appear. If the girl
has been able to integrate her early genital anxieties, identify with her
FEMALE GENITAL ANXIETIES, CONFLICTS AND TYPICAL MASTERY MODES 211
mother, be at one with her in her femaleness and simultaneously, identify
with a father who sees her as female but facilitates identification with him
securing her difference from her mother, then she is developmentally in a
position to enter the fraught rivalrous nature of the Oedipal, bear the
fears and disappointments of that phase and arrive at true genitality.
Summary
This paper focuses on the female experience of her own body, the
unique anxieties that arise from the nature of the female genitals and the
role of the female body in female development. Following Freud’s
theories of the importance of integrating body experiences in the
development of psychic structures, the girl’s body and her efforts to
integrate it are seen as uniquely feminine.
Three anxieties are described—access, penetration and diffusivity.
These represent dangers to body integrity comparable to, but different
from, boys’ experience of castration anxiety. Not only do different
genitals give rise to different anxieties, the different body experiences
give rise to different modes of mastery (defence), shaping different
character structures.
While males can readily form discrete, concrete mental representations
of their genitals, females cannot. While the boy can rely on direct sensory
experience, the developing girl must rely on proprioceptive experiences,
symbolization, and on other people to aid her in defining her elusive
genital experience. This interpretation of the female genital experience
provides a psychoanalytic framework for the object embeddedness long
observed as part of the feminine character.
Notes
1 I am using the phrase ‘modes of mastery’ to describe the engagement and
integration of developmental tasks. Like crawling, drinking from the cup,
walking and acquiring language, integrating the body image, including the
genitals, into the psyche is a necessary developmental achievement.
‘Defence’ is the more usual psychoanalytic term, but always implies danger
and conflict. While any developmental task, particularly the integration of
the genitals into the self-image, can become conflictual, thereby motivating
defence, I do believe there are aspects of each task which are conflict free
(Hartmann 1939), simply requiring integration into the ongoing
developmental process. ‘Mastery’ seems to me a more appropriate word to
describe aspects of developmental integration than ‘defence’.
2 A colleague with whom I have discussed this material has found it useful
clinically to interpret the oral disturbance in terms of vaginal control issues.
212 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
3 Proprioceptive and vascular sensations occur spontaneously but can be
either repressed or integrated: parental support is critical for integration to occur.
4 In my experience, female patients of all ages dream quite frequently of
anxiety about entry through doors and windows. Standard interpretation
would be about sexual anxiety. I have found that interpretation of the
anxiety being over control of the opening to be efficacious in mastery of
that anxiety. It makes a big difference whether the patient’s fear that she is
invadable is confirmed or if her wish for control is confirmed.
5 Such problems are more acute when mothers over-identify with their
children as did A’s mother or are generally intrusive. Mothers seem to be in
this position more frequently with their daughters than with their sons. I
think the reflection from the genital to psychic is inherent in girls although
it can be made more difficult by particular kinds of mothering.
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10
‘The weak spot’—some observations on male
sexuality
MERVIN GLASSER
In the first of his ‘Three essays on sexuality’ (Freud 1905) in which he
discusses the sexual aberrations, Freud comes to express his belief that
‘the impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are
the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind’ (p. 149). He continues:
anyone who is in any way, whether socially or ethically, abnormal
mentally is invariably abnormal also in his sexual life. But many people
are abnormal in their sexual life who in every other respect
approximate to the average, and have, along with the rest, passed
through the process of human cultural development, in which
sexuality remains the weak spot.
And later in the same essay he states: ‘Here again we cannot escape from
the fact that people whose behaviour is in other respects normal can,
under the domination of the most unruly of all instincts, put themselves in the
category of sick persons in the single sphere of sexual life’ (p. 161, my italics).
One of the themes of this paper will be to challenge this view of
sexuality and to demonstrate that far from being ‘weak’ and ‘unruly’
man’s sexuality is his most powerful and willing servant, or assistant,
always ready to aid him in his attempts to find satisfaction and peace. His
sexuality is (to choose an appropriate metaphor) his ever-willing genie,
able to expand from the confines of a small phial to become an enormous
giant, all powerful, capable of conquering time and space, executing miracles
—all in the service of bringing about the fulfilment of his master’s
deepest wishes.
This essential and ubiquitous role of sexuality is nowhere more vividly
illustrated than in the perversions: here the observation of the contortions
that man’s sexuality is willing to undergo in pursuit of its master’s wellbeing cannot fail to convince one of this point. This is acknowledged in
one way or another by all those analysts who have worked in the field of
the perversions (such as Chasseguet-Smirgel 1978; Gillespie 1956; Glasser
1979; Glover 1933; Khan 1979; Limentani 1976; McDougall 1980;
215
216 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Rosen 1979; Stoller 1975). However, the organizers of this Conference
asked me not to centre this talk on the perversions and I must say I
welcome this constraint since the points I would like to make would
stand the risk of being discredited on the grounds of a bias in my
illustrative clinical material.
The patients I shall refer to, then, will be representative of the ordinary
patients seen in analytic practice, in so far as this can ever be said to be
the case. I have decided mainly to confine my clinical examples to the socalled homosexual aspects of the transference partly because it is so
commonly observed, partly to put some limit on what is an endless series
of possible discussion points and partly so that the patients mentioned can
be compared with one another.
Mr P, a member of one of the helping professions, told me at the start
of a session that on the way and while sitting in the waiting-room, he
had enjoyed thinking about the meal he was going to prepare for some
people he was entertaining that evening. The patient, a bachelor in his
early thirties, had a history of the sort of extreme neglect and emotional
deprivation which only the children of the very rich can experience.
With his father absent at business during the day and generally
uninterested in the evenings, with his mother caught up in her daily
round of social activities, and with both parents quite often away on
holidays abroad, the care of Mr P and his siblings was left to a string of
maids, housekeepers, butlers and chauffeurs. One of the ways he had
coped with the absence of his mother was by seemingly identifying with
the mother he wanted her to be. He thus took great pleasure in playing a
benevolent, caring role in his social relationships, being willing to put
himself to great trouble for others, giving them financial assistance, and so
on. Another way in which he put himself in his mother’s place was as the
recipient of his father’s sadistically-coloured interest, epitomized in
masochistic homosexual fantasies, which he never acted out.
With a coming long weekend in mind, I considered whether to take
up in the transference his feeding-and-entertaining thoughts in terms of a
fellatio fantasy (that is, placing the emphasis of my interpretation on his
use of sexuality to cope with the pending deprivation) or to concentrate
rather on his identifying with his mother as the person in control of
emotional supplies. In the event, after a short silence, he started talking
about a meeting he was going to have with the head of a large
organization in the hope of getting an appointment to a post which he
very much wanted. With some hesitation, he went on to say that he had
to admit that he had had fantasies of this man cuddling him and that
these were accompanied by sexual feelings.
This session occurred in the context of his starting at last, after a
number of years of the most determined resistance, to acknowledge faults
‘THE WEAK SPOT’—SOME OBSERVATIONS ON MALE SEXUALITY 217
of his defensively idealized mother. As a result of his starting to recognize
his rage with her, he had had a number of major quarrels with his
mother and he had broken off a long-standing, though rather sterile,
relationship with a girlfriend. Although he complained of his general
apathy and tiredness, he had not acknowledged his feelings of loss.
We may thus observe him employing his sexuality in a predominantly
passive, masochistic, homosexual way to help him deal with the painful
affects of loss and insecurity at the pending departure—fundamentally
emotional withdrawal—of his mother/analyst. This patient, by the way,
had the habit of putting his hand inside his trousers while lying on the
couch and holding his penis in a quite unabashed way. He did not obtain
an erection, nor did he acknowledge any sexual excitement. It could be
said that his penis featured as a comfort, a transitional object,1 much more
than a sexual organ. Yet the sexuality in this act did play a part; it could
not be denied. It was, after all, not the same as holding any other part of
his body, let alone an inanimate object. The ‘special’ sensation he must
have experienced enabled him to experience himself being held, warmed
and enlivened by his longed-for mother:2 because I would not cuddle
him in the session, he did it himself, thus again using sexuality to counter
feelings of rejection and deprivation.
There were other ingredients in his ‘homosexual’ relationship to me.
We came to see that as much as he longed for his mother he also found it
imperative to keep her at a controlled distance from him. This was
because he experienced his mother, who was certainly narcissistic and
exploitative in her relationship to him, as intrusively possessive or
engulfing. A vivid illustration of this in the transference was the occasion
when he said that he had the sudden fear as he came into the consulting
room that the large leaves of a tree immediately outside would wrap
themselves around him and suffocate him. In order to distance himself
from such an annihilatory mother he employed his homosexuality. For
instance, he became engaged to a girl he felt quite strongly for and they
were, for various reasons, separated for a number of months. During this
time he talked about how much he longed for her and dwelt on the
qualities he admired so much about her or found so desirable in her. At
last the time came when he could go to visit her. They rushed to greet
each other at the side of a swimming-pool and at the moment that they
embraced he found himself looking across the pool at a man he found
attractive. This intense longing, counterpointed by a distancing defence,
was characteristic of Mr P. In the same session that he expressed his fear
of the engulfing leaves, he complained that I left all the work to him and
that he was sure the analysis would progress much more rapidly if I gave
him a kick up the backside.
218 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
As the analysis progressed we came to discern that his seeming
homosexual posture also aimed to conceal his sadistic masculinity, that is,
to hide both his sadism to avoid guilt and his masculinity to avoid
castration. His father had been a frighteningly large and powerful figure
in his childhood and he had had no compunction about chastising his
children. Mr P’s submissiveness was a way of both placating his father
and hiding his retaliatory feelings. His Oedipal rivalry was kept well out
of the picture by this apparent feminine identification: unlike his brother,
for example, who had gone into their father’s business, Mr P was in a
lowly rated post in a caring profession. But he had learnt, from his family,
to be devious so that no one knew of his great ambitions until he spoke
of them to me. He had also learnt from his father to be covertly sadistic.
For example, Mr P met his father after work one day to learn of the
outcome of a meeting his father had attended which was of the utmost
importance to Mr P. As they travelled home in the car his father sat in
silence with his eyes closed, having said he was very tired, and Mr P had
simply to sit and wait to learn what had transpired. This was often
repeated with the roles reversed in the treatment situation when he
would respond to substantial interpretations with an extended silence, or
when he would not tell me of the outcome of some important event
which had occurred between the previous and present sessions.
The significance of this patient’s ‘homosexuality’ in the transference
may be compared with that of a second patient, Mr Q. He was the
married head of an art school, and in his forties. After some time in
analysis, he came to talk of matters which pointed to not particularly
unusual conflicts in regard to Oedipally centred homosexual interests. He
had made some remarks in sessions which obliquely indicated feelings of
rivalry with me and he had also talked about rivalrous incidents with
colleagues at work. In this context he came to mention his curiosity
about some members of his staff whom he knew to be homosexual. This
led to his admitting that he occasionally wondered what it would be like
to be the passive partner in anal intercourse, an interest which had
expressed itself in the transference in various ways—for example, his
saying that he had stopped listening to what I was saying because he felt
as if my words were being forced painfully into him against his will.
He talked from time to time about how, although he was a fully
accepted, liked and respected head of the art school, he always contrived
to have an older man on his staff who, while experienced and able to
give valuable advice, never challenged his role or status. He felt reassured
that he could turn to such a man (and he frequently did so, quite openly)
to seek advice on difficult matters of administrative and artistic policy. In
this phase of the treatment, he would frequently ask me what I thought a
puzzling piece of his behaviour might mean or what I considered to be
‘THE WEAK SPOT’—SOME OBSERVATIONS ON MALE SEXUALITY 219
the interpretation of a dream he had the previous night. He maintained
that enquiring in this way was quite sensible on his part since I was the
expert and obviously could supply the answer if I wanted to, even
though the truth might sometimes be painful.
The significance of his transference fantasy of acquiring my masculine
power through submitting to my anal penetration emerged later in his
analysis. He had come to recognize his extreme hostility to his mother
and how much he had hated her when he was a small boy. He spoke of
how she crowded in on him; dominated him with her intense
possessivensss and single-mindedness. He had previously spoken of her
great love for him and his feeling that in fact he mattered to her more
than his siblings. He had also spoken of what a passionate ‘woman she
was and recognized, with some discomfort, how sensual she was. At this
time he started reporting how he was progressing, especially
professionally: he found himself preferring to take more independent
action in his work and he was no longer being so accommodating to his
dominating wife. Although he gave impressive examples, I felt rather
doubtful about his progress: I wondered if this was not an example of
how a patient ‘borrows’ his analyst’s masculinity and therefore appears to
be functioning with a new-found confidence, assertiveness and
effectiveness. At the same time, I thought he could be experiencing me
as his dominating, obliterative mother and was therefore making a sort of
‘flight into health’.
In his early years, Mr Q’s father was absent for most of the time. He
was involved in an international organization and was therefore away
from home for extended periods. In the clinical material, his father’s visits
initially featured as unwelcome intrusions into the contented snugness of
his seemingly exclusive relationship with his mother—his siblings being
some years older were away at boarding-school for a lot of the time. But
with the persistent analysis of the patient’s seductiveness with me, and of
his anger with me for not supplying the answers or giving directives and,
above all, from his reactions to my absences, we came to see that his
anger with his father was not so much because of his presence but more
because of his absence. We came to see how much he wanted his analystfather to be his ally, give him support and advise him on how to
withstand the possessive dominance of his analyst-mother. His
homosexuality, then, was predominantly an attempt to find a way of
internalizing his father as an inner ally against his acquisitive internalized
mother. I shall be considering these matters more extensively shortly but
now I would like to emphasize how Mr Q was being aided by his
sexuality in seeking to establish an inner bulwark to withstand being
overwhelmed by his mother.
220 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
It will be seen that with both Mr P and Mr Q, I have focused my
attention on how the heterosexual ingredient of the transference carries
anxieties reflecting a fear of annihilation by the mother and the
homosexual component carries the aim of averting this by turning to the
father. It is my view that this is a reflection of processes in normal
development and I would now like to elaborate what I have in mind.
From my clinical study of patients with perversions I came to identify a
dynamic organization which I referred to as the ‘Core Complex’, and I
subsequently came to regard this complex as a normal phase through
which the infant has to pass (Glasser 1979). It seemed to me that different
clinical conditions reflected different outcomes of the core complex—a
point that this paper will illustrate incidentally.
The ingredients of the core complex are intimately interrelated so that
each is strongly coloured by the others. The first of these which I shall
consider is the infant’s intense longing for a condition of satiety and
security achieved through fusion with the mother, a state which is
expressed by the adult as a longing for ‘union’, ‘merging’, ‘at-one-ness’
and other such phrases. However, based probably on a combination of
the projection of the infant’s own all-consuming needs and its
‘knowledge’ of the incorporative desires of the mother, such a concept of
fusion carries with it the attribute of an inevitable complete possession by
the mother and thus total annihilation. This was well-expressed by Mr
R, a patient I shall be considering later, when he said it was ‘like sugar
dissolving in a cup of coffee’.
One of the reactions to this threat of annihilation is ‘flight’, that is,
essentially a narcissistic withdrawal. However, this brings with it a
situation of total isolation with its attendant feelings of complete
deprivation and abandonment. Furthermore, the only focus for the
aggression initially directed towards the object (which I shall consider in
a moment) is the self, often the body. The intense anxieties of
abandonment and the pain of deprivation prompt longings for complete
and indissoluble union with the object and we can thus observe that this
aspect of the core complex has the quality of a vicious circle.
A second fundamental reaction to the threat of annihilation by the
possessing mother is aggression. I must digress briefly at this point to state
my understanding of aggression and distinguish it from sadism, because
these are basic concepts to my discussion. In keeping with the outlook of
contemporary biology (Coxon 1983) and a viewpoint expounded by
Freud (1915) in his ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’, my view is that
aggression is provoked by any threat to the physical or psychological
homeostasis of the individual, that is, ultimately, his survival. Aggression
is thus always self-preservative and aims at totally obliterating, negating,
the threat. In this sense it is essentially adaptive and not object-related.
‘THE WEAK SPOT’—SOME OBSERVATIONS ON MALE SEXUALITY 221
Sadism, on the other hand, is entirely object-related. In the sadistic act,
the effect on the object is essential: the specific aim is to cause the object
to suffer physically or mentally. Domination and control are obviously
critical features common to both aggression and sadism: in the former
they are sought only to promote the aim of negating the danger: while in
sadism they play an essential role in engaging the object but at ‘a safe
distance’, as I shall elaborate shortly.
To return now to the core complex: since the mother is considered to
be annihilatory she will provoke an aggressive reaction which is aimed at
totally destroying her. But she is, after all, the (only) object which can
gratify all the infant’s needs. Thus the infant is confronted by an
irreconcilable conflict of opposites. The pervert shows us that one of the
attempted solutions to this is the employing of sexualization which
converts aggression into sadism: the intention to destroy is converted to
the wish to hurt and control. In this way the mother is preserved and the
viability of the relationship to her is ensured albeit henceforth in
sadomasochistic terms.
The threat of total deprivation and the turning of the aggression on to
the self resulting from the withdrawl component of the core complex is
also dealt with by sexualization, the aggression thus being converted into
masochism and the mother being retrieved by what we may call ‘the
masochistic invitation’ of the infant.
Clinical observation shows us that both sadism and masochism have
the characteristic of engaging the object in an intense relationship but
intimacy and union are never present, the object and the self are very
carefully kept ‘at a safe distance’ from each other.
In my view, these ingredients and processes of the core complex are
passed through in the course of normal development and how they are
dealt with plays an important part in the individual’s future make-up. In
the case of the pervert, he remains fixated at this stage for reasons I need
not go into. But this is not, of course, the only possible outcome. I have
not studied psychotics in sufficient number or depth to generalize, but
the kind of ‘solution’ they ‘chose’ may be exemplified by the patient
who believed himself to be in his own abdomen. He would conduct a
dialogue with himself in his own abdomen. Every now and then he
would emit a weird, intensely violent exhaling sound, opening his mouth
as wide as it could go and sticking his tongue out as far as he could. This
could be understood as an intense attack on his mother-self (the
aggressive, self-preservative reaction) as well as expelling his infant-self
(the withdrawal reaction) and then returning to what we may fancifully
call the intrauterine symbiotic state of fusion.
In the ordinary family set-up, what offers a different solution from
those found by the pervert and the psychotic is, as indicated by the
222 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
clinical material I have provided, the presence of the father. With the
father present, the infant can seek a solution to the core complex’s
‘irreconcilable conflict of opposites’ by turning to the father as an
alternative object, and this step then has a number of variable outcomes.
The turning to the father is essentially an internalizing step for it is in the
internal world that the self is in danger of being taken over by the
mother and it is in the internal world that the father must act in two
ways: firstly he must serve as the wall of the fortress that keeps the
mother out (an image frequently encountered in patients’ dreams and
metaphors) and secondly, he must be an alternative object or the infant’s
libidinal feelings and need for caring. In this way he can decrease the
intensity of the need for the mother and allay anxieties of insecurity. For
such a step to become stable and permanent, the internalization must
proceed to identification.3
The differences in these particular processes of internalization make a
substantial contribution to the future differences between male and
female sexuality. In the boy’s identification to the father, he can assert his
separateness from his mother by the bodily ingredients of the
identification which he emphasizes. The girl, on the other hand,
identifies more with the psychological attributes of the father and it is to
these she particularly turns in her heterosexual needs to separate herself
from her mother.4 I consider these influences contribute to the tendency
in males to approach their sexual relationships with physical features
playing a more important role than is the case with females, who tend to
be more affected by psychological factors. I also believe this is one of the
psychological factors which combine with the anatomical determinants to
make men experience intercourse as ‘outside’ themselves while women
experience it as taking place ‘inside’ themselves. I believe it is in this
context that we should place Lichtenstein’s (1961) argument that nonprocreative sexuality’, as he calls it, serves the establishment of the
primary identity theme in man.
If we return to Mr Q we can now appreciate that he was, in his
homosexual transference relationship, trying to achieve the resolution of
his core complex attachment to his mother by aiming to internalize the
analyst in order to reinforce his tenuous identification with his father. I
remind you of how he felt his mother to be powerful and possessive to
the point of being annihilatory and how the presence of a father-figure
enabled him to be assertive and expressive of his own personality. The
sexual ingredient in the transference expresses the fantasy of an
incorporation which promotes independence, an assimilation, to use
Freud’s (1900) word which results in a sense of freedom and selfexpression rather than simply a transfer of subjugators. The doubts I
expressed about Mr Q’s progress could now be restated as my not being
‘THE WEAK SPOT’—SOME OBSERVATIONS ON MALE SEXUALITY 223
able to tell whether his improvement was simply a result of imitation
(Gaddini 1969) or whether identificatory processes were taking place.
Later, I could observe that Mr Q came to experience great pleasure in his
paternal role in his family, paying attention to his hitherto neglected sons
and comfortably assuming the responsibilities of the man of the house,
i.e., the development was a full and permanent one established by
identification.5
Like Mr Q, Mr P (the first patient I discussed), attempted to make use
of homosexuality to establish a pathway to identification with his father’s
masculinity as a means of withstanding his mother’s possession of him.
But we see that in this he is only partly successful and the clinical picture
is a mixed one. Core complex anxieties play a prominent part. You will
remember his fear of the engulfing leaves and his fiancée’s embrace: these
can now be understood as expressions of the ever-present, pervasive
annihilatory anxiety. It was difficult to observe the other basic anxiety of
the core complex—abandonment anxiety—in the transference, because
of his extensive repression of affects. Holidays or weekends, for example,
were met with evident equanimity and it was only after some time that
these feelings could be reached by pursuing the relationship of his
masturbation to loss.
I referred earlier to Mr P’s seeming identification with his mother.
Perhaps I should have used the word partial, because to the extent that
his internal dynamics are governed by the primitive anxieties of the core
complex, we would expect identification to be prevented since it would
carry the meaning of possession by the internal mother. In fact this could
be experienced clinically by sensing at times the sort of inconsistent and
rather shallow quality of the identification. And it could be observed in
many areas of his clinical material: it was most impressive, for example, to
watch over a period of time how the recipients of his good work and
benevolence disappeared out of his life without the slightest evidence of
his experiencing any sense of loss. I initially understood such clinical
material to be the result of a massive repression of his affects but,
although, as I’ve said, this was extensive, I came to understand that to a
substantial degree his core complex anxieties made identification with his
primary objects only partially possible; to a large extent his internalization
could go no further than imitation. Some degree of identification could be
seen to have taken place not only with his mother but also with his
father, the latter serving rather like Mr Q, as a protection from his
mother’s engulfment. (I remind you of the scene at the swimming-pool.)
But because of the heavy imprint of the core complex and because of his
father’s remoteness and sadism, the nature of Mr P’s masculine way of
relating is closer to that of the pervert where, as I’ve discussed, full,
intimate engagement is avoided and sadomasochism keeps the object
224 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
engaged but at a controlled distance. I illustrated this when I described
how he used his silences in the sessions. The limited extent to which
identification took place can be seen in the fact that he was greatly
restricted in his use of sexuality with both men and women, emotionally
and physically. One of the ways this showed clinically was in the quality
and relative infrequency of his castration anxiety.
This leads me to assert at this point that in my view to refer to a
person’s ‘castration anxiety’ is nowadays much too crude and gross a
description. We have come to see the great extent of individual variation
that exists within this form of anxiety, in terms of its antecedents, the
precise quality of the affect experienced, the nature of the objects who
threaten castration, the role of sexuality in the individual’s dynamics (as
this paper discusses) and other such considerations.
The differences in the nature of castration anxiety, and the influence
which the core complex may exert on it, is well illustrated by comparing
Mr P and Mr Q with a third patient, Mr R, who also assumed a
submissive, homosexual attitude in the transference. He was a young businessman who came for treatment complaining of depression and occasional
impotence. He expressed intensely narcissistic, grand ambitions such as
hoping to be president of British Leyland and having his photograph on
the front page of The Times. Of course he wanted to be an outstanding
patient and provide me with whatever clinical material he thought was
impressive. There was, evident from the start, a certain false quality to his
expression of substantial insight and to his promotion of the therapeutic
process. And his analysis was characterized by episodes of what appeared
to be negative therapeutic reactions.
From time to time he would leave a session which we would both
have felt to have been very productive and he might have commented
that he believed he had made great progress in understanding himself.
However, in the next two or three hours he would somehow set about
demolishing this good feeling and in fact end up feeling just the reverse,
that is, insecure, uncertain and lacking in any positive self-confidence.
There seemed to be an Oedipal significance to this as was highlighted
by his reaction to a strongly competitive situation at his place of work:
when the anxieties of the situation became particularly intense, he
expressed his feelings of wanting to lie back, open his legs and let his
rivals ‘screw’ him. He would feel tense, apprehensive and bite his nails.
He even went so far as to sprain his ankle badly, an act which, on the
basis of other material, had a definite self-castrating significance. At other
periods of his analysis, often in relation to substantial success, he would
report feeling extremely anxious about his apparent shortcomings. He
would find this or that to doubt about himself and even condemn
himself, usually in contradiction to the observable facts. He would
‘THE WEAK SPOT’—SOME OBSERVATIONS ON MALE SEXUALITY 225
describe how he felt his feet sweating and his penis shrinking. He would
experience the same sort of reaction directly to me in the transference.
Nevertheless he had, over the course of his analysis, progressed
impressively in his business career, moving to another firm and building
himself up so well that he became something of a wonder in his
commercial circles; and when he moved to a third job he could
command a substantial salary and status as a managing director. Between
moving from the second to the third job he went on holiday with his
girlfriend, Sandra.
He returned from this holiday looking healthy and cheerful. He started
the session by speaking enthusiastically about what a wonderful time he
had had. He spoke glowingly about Sandra. She was such a wonderful person
—straightforward, un-neurotic, good-humoured. She was so loving to
him and, in contrast to his mother, was content to let him just be
himself. And she was so beautiful! And their time in bed together was so
wonderful! He really, really appreciated her and loved her. It was the first
time in his life that he had been able to have a real, loving relationship.
He went on to say that although he was telling me this just to let me
know how his holiday had gone, he also wanted to express his gratitude
to me because all this was undoubtedly the result of his analysis, and he
wanted to let me have the pleasure of seeing the results of my therapeutic
good work.
He then went on to tell me that at the same time as he was having
such a wonderful time with Sandra in the day, he was having a terrible
time at night having awful dreams about failure. As an example, he
quoted a dream
in which he had joined his new company, the head of which turned out to be a
great fool—something the head of the previous firm somehow knew, with the
result that he could mock Mr R and triumph over him for having left his firm
for a new one.
All the dreams were characterized by his being humiliatingly castrated
through his being a failure.
Rather than taking up the evident Oedipal rivalry meanings of this, I
chose to point out that just as I was invited to look at his daytime
achievements as evidence of my success, so I would have to see his
dreams as evidence of my failure. I related this to what we had worked at
extensively, namely, his intensely mixed relationship to his mother. She
had very much seen him as the vehicle for the achievement of her
dreams and ideals. She had devoted herself to bringing him up to be the
very best. Although they had come from a farming family in the North,
she had taught him to speak English without a provincial accent, to read
226 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
and write well ahead of his years, to have perfect manners, to have the
right taste in his dress, to be charming and so on. Once she had said:
‘You are my Ming vase.’ She would boost his self-esteem but always
conveying how pleased she was that he was coming up to her ideals and
expectations. In short, she related to him in an extremely narcissistic way,
making little or no allowance for his individual needs and qualities.
Particularly relevant to my discussion is the way the clinical material
showed how he was used by her to deal with his penis envy feelings. On
the one hand, he was meant to give her the vicarious fulfilment of her
longings by being exceptionally successful in the male field and in this
way, because it was all fundamentally her doing, to be her magnificent,
universally admired, triumphant phallus. On the other hand, her envy
expressed itself in a strong condemnation of sexual man. She conveyed
her contempt for his father and expressed her disgust with his male ways.
She insisted that her son bathed regularly so that he would never emanate
what she called ‘man-smell’. Male sexuality was, in short, denigrated to
being something anal and greedy and she would never countenance that
sort of thing in her son.
Mr R had always wanted to earn his mother’s love by fulfilling her
narcissistic needs. For example, when writing to his parents while on holidayhe felt a sense of shame that Sandra was not anyone socially special. What
his mother would want was that Sandra was ‘Lady-Princess So-and-So,
who had written books on cooking and things like that, and was a friend
of the Queen’. But at the same time he felt that any of his achievements
or successes would not serve as any affirmation of him: it would be
evidence of how capable his mother had been in the way she had brought
him up and moulded him. In becoming a Ming vase his own form and
colour was lost in the interests of demonstrating how good a potter she was.
If success carried the meaning of annihilation of his own individuality,
the only way of self-affirmation open to him was, paradoxically, failure.
In this he could be sure he was being something of his choice, something
to which his mother would certainly never lay claim. Thus, while on the
surface he was being the successful young man, inwardly he could give
himself concrete reassurance through his experiencing his bodily
symptoms of anxiety and his near-delusional belief that his penis had
shrunk, that he was withstanding his mother’s annihilatory possession.6
I made the point when discussing Mr P that, because of the core
complex anxieties, his capacity to internalize was substantially restricted
to imitation. This was even more the case with Mr R who can best be
regarded as having a false self system (Winnicott 1960). It seems to me
that imitation is the essential mechanism of the false self personality. His
being the exceptional patient, the successful business-man and so on were
all the result of his use of imitation—an imitation, it should be noted, not
‘THE WEAK SPOT’—SOME OBSERVATIONS ON MALE SEXUALITY 227
so much of real individuals in his past or present environment, but rather
of ideal fantasy figures held up to him by his own or his mother’s
narcissism. But the inner, secret ‘castrated’ self was also a contrivance and
we may thus think of a false self within a false self. Somewhere, even
more deeply hidden, was a true self of which he had little or no
knowledge. (See also Limentani 1979.)
The skill and subtlety of his evasive imitations aimed at protecting his
true self could often be observed in the way he reacted to interpretations.
He would endorse what I had just said in a way which conveyed that he
fully recognized in himself what I was pointing out and that he could see
with some enthusiasm the benefit of his altered perspective. Then, as if to
develop the point, using a phrase like ‘and also’ he would expound a new
line of thought which, though not exactly irrelevant and even, perhaps,
quite worthy in its own right, completely took his attention away from
the point I had made. In this way he totally divested himself of my
influence while seeming to be just what he believed I wanted him to be.
It might seem contradictory to his great need for failure that he did so
well in his career and that the personality he manifested generally was
always substantially masculine. I found this puzzling, particularly since his
father featured as a weak figure who had failed in his life (a fact which his
mother did not hesitate to emphasize) so that he did not appear to be an
appropriate identificatory figure. But we know that a false self personality
can be extraordinarily successful in public life: it is a success driven by
intense narcissistic needs (brought about by the isolation into which his
true self has been driven), needs which make him particularly adept at
imitating (identification not being available to him) the ideal male figure
of the fantasy held up to him by his mother.
It will be appreciated that the core complex occurs within an
essentially narcissistic context, and among the consequences of the
individual being fixated at this point is that his sexuality cannot be
employed to help him in his development and in establishing object
relationships. I could observe evidence of Mr R making attempts to
establish real relationships via hints at polymorph-perverse fantasies
(paedophilia, bestiality, etc.) and via sadistic fantasies involving women,
such as Sandra, but these always fell away, like the sea sweeping up the
beach but always receding. It was not that Mr R’s sexuality was his ‘weak
spot’, it was its unemployability which left him vulnerable.
If we compare the three patients I have considered, we can see that
there is a complex relationship between the core complex dynamics, the
processes of internalization, the use of sexuality and castration anxiety, or
to put it another way, the particular significance of the penis. For normal
male development, an essential ingredient is the boy’s bodily
identification with his father, including, particularly, his penis. In the case
228 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
of Mr R, his father’s penis hardly seems to feature. Much greater
prominence is given to his mother’s phallus and her narcissistic
involvement with it, and his castration anxiety takes place predominantly
in these terms. With Mr Q, in contrast, his turning to his father to
acquire his penis, that is, to carry out an identificatory process, implies a
recognition and a valuing of it by the mother, despite the father’s
physical absence for a substantial portion of time. While with Mr P, the
situation in these respects is a mixed one in which we can observe a
mixture of identification and imitation and the penis he has at his
disposal, so to speak, is a mixture of his mother’s phallus and his father’s
sadistic (i.e., perverse) penis. The nature of each of these men’s sexuality
and their castration anxiety is thus substantially different.
I have limited my discussion to a confined area of male sexuality in the
transference in order to make such a discussion manageable. When first
considering this paper I found myself becoming more and more
perplexed by the extent of the subject and by my attempt to characterize
male, as distinct from female, sexuality. I saw that, whatever animal or
endocrinological studies might tell us (Limentani 1979), human sexuality
was so capable of transformation and adaptation according to the internal
and external circumstances of the individual—family configurations,
cultural attitudes, traumata, identificatory processes and so on—that a
simple characterization of the fundamental, or original, nature of male
sexuality could be no more than a distortion. Even ‘bisexuality’ seemed
to me to underestimate the multipotential qualities of human sexuality.
In this paper I have tried to demonstrate by discussion and clinical
illustration that, with its capacity to bind and its extraordinary pliability,
male sexuality (and, of course, female sexuality), far from being a ‘weak
spot’ plays a major role in the protection of psychological survival and in
the promotion of psychic growth of the individual.
Summary
Male sexuality plays an essential role in the protection of psychological
survival and in the promotion of psychic development. This proposition
is explored in the ‘homosexual’ transference of three male patients and
their differing uses of sexuality is compared. The concept of the core
complex is briefly elaborated. The interrelations between the core
complex, processes of internalization and castration anxiety, and the role
played by sexuality in these contexts are considered.
‘THE WEAK SPOT’—SOME OBSERVATIONS ON MALE SEXUALITY 229
Notes
This paper was presented at the London Weekend Conference for
English Speaking Members of European Societies. 12–14 October 1984.
1 I am grateful to Prof.ssa Renata Gaddini de Benedetti for pointing out, in
the discussion following the presentation of this paper, that this should more
appropriately be referred to as a precursor of a transitional object, as the object
involved is part of the individual’s body.
2 I arrived at this understanding of this behaviour of Mr P after hearing M.
Eglé Laufer’s (1982) paper on ‘Female masturbation’.
3 I am grateful to Mr Donald Campbell who, after I had discussed Mr Q with
him in these terms, drew my attention to Greenson’s (1968) paper,
‘Disidentifying from the mother’, which follows a rather similar line of thinking.
4 This adds an additional ingredient to the meaning of penis envy. I would
add in passing that these considerations make us appreciate that the girl can
only properly identify with her mother if she has the protection of an
identification with her father.
5 I’m inclined to believe that, to put this more precisely, the process which
takes place is that existing paternal identifications are released and
reinforced, rather than features of the analyst himself being utilized.
6 In my experience similar considerations can play an important role in
suicide attempts and other self-destructive pathology.
References
Coxon, A. (1983). Organic aspects of violence. Unpublished.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1978). Reflexions on the connexions between
perversions and sadism. Int. J. Psychoanal, 59:27–35.
Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. S.E. 4–5.
——(1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. S.E. 7.
——(1915). Instincts and their vicissitudes. S.E. 14.
Gaddini, E. (1969). On imitation. Int. J. Psychoanal, 50:475–84.
Gillespie, W.H. (1956). The general theory of sexual perversion. Int. J.
Psychoanal., 37:396–403.
Glasser, M. (1979). Some aspects of the role of aggression in the perversions.
In Sexual Deviation, ed. I.Rosen. London: Oxford Univ. Press, pp. 278–305.
Glover, E. (1933). The relation of perversion formation to the development
of reality sense. Int. J. Psychoanal, 14:486–504.
Greenson, R.R. (1968). Dis-identifying from mother: its special importance
for the boy. Int. J. Psychoanal, 49:370–4.
Khan, M.M.R. (1979). Alienation in Perversions. London: Hogarth Press.
Laufer, M.E. (1982). Female masturbation in adolesence and the
development of the relationship to the body. Int. J. Psychoanal., 63:295–302.
230 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Lichtenstein, H. (1961). Sexuality and identity. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 9:
179–260.
Limentani, A. (1976). Object choice and actual bisexuality. Int. J. Psychoanal.
Psychother., 5:205–19.
——(1979). The significance of transsexualism in relation to some basic
psychoanalytic concepts. Int. Rev. Psychanal., 6:139–54.
McDougall, J. (1980). Plea for a Measure of Abnormality. New York: Int.
Univ. Press.
Money, J. and Tucker, P. (1975). Sexual Signatures. London: George G.Harrap.
Rosen, I. (1979). Perversion as regulator of self-esteem. In Sexual Deviation,
ed. I.Rosen. London: Oxford Univ. Press, pp. 65–78.
Stoller, R. (1975). Perversion: the Erotic Form of Hatred. London: Harvester Press.
Winnicott, D.W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In
The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth
Press, 1965, pp. 140–52.
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PART FOUR
Bisexuality
232
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Introduction
Bisexuality brings to the foreground again the question of the
relationship of body and mind, of biological bisexuality and psychological
bisexuality. As with femininity, Freud felt that, although fundamental,
the concept of bisexuality was impregnated with obscurity.
Bisexuality is originally for Freud a clinical concept: ‘without taking
bisexuality into account I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at
an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be
observed in men and women’ (Freud 1905:22). This concept reflects the
duality inherent in Freud’s work. It is used at times to express the
biological predisposition of the human individual, while at other times
Freud uses it to refer to the balance of object relationships. Sometimes it
is seen as a given from which there is a necessary involution as
development proceeds in order to achieve a sexual identity; at other
times it is seen as a state necessary for psychic and sexual integration. This
does not necessarily imply object choice but refers to mental functioning
and mental characteristics and identifications. The latter meaning has
been given increasing importance in contemporary writings with the
identification to each parent being seen as serving important functions.
Neither model helps to explain or describe the differential account
Freud gives of masculine and feminine development, but the second one—
that of a psychological bisexual functioning essential to sexual integration—
describes an ongoing dynamic within each development which gives it its
complexity. In that sense his theory of bisexuality runs somewhat in
parallel to that of psychosexuality. The concept of the Oedipus complex
became widened to incorporate the notion of bisexuality since it came to
represent both positive and negative versions and simply refer to the
child’s position in the triangle, while at the same time, the concept of the
Oedipus complex was still retained to give meaning to masculine or to
feminine development.
In the case of female sexuality, bisexuality took on an added meaning
in that Freud describes two discrete phases of development, first
234
INTRODUCTION 235
masculine, then feminine. For this reason he believed that women were
more bisexual than men, and he recognized ‘masculinity’ in women
more than femininity’ in men.
While Freud thought that women were more bisexual than men
because of the early ‘homosexual’ attachment to the mother, more recent
writings stress the importance of the feminine component in men due to
the early identification with the mother. This feminine identification is
now understood as being not just a threat to masculinity but, more
importantly, as potentially positive for intrapsychic and interrelational
balance.
Clinically, bisexuality is a concept which has been used extensively
implicitly or explicitly, though writings on the topic are surprisingly few.
This section comprises papers which have made clinical use of the idea of
psychic bisexuality.
McDougall (1989) discusses the importance of identifications with
both parents and their role in the structuring of sexual identity. Greenson
(1968), Aisenstein (1984) and Limentani (1989) all, in different ways,
consider the large part played by femininity in men.
11
The dead father: on early psychic trauma and
its relation to disturbance in sexual identity
and in creative activity
JOYCE MCDOUGALL
Psychoanalysis has as yet no comprehensive theory of core gender and
sexual identity (in the sense in which Stoller (1968) defines these terms).
As a psychic construction, gender and sexual identity have both
biological and acquired origins and are thus at the research crossroads of
several scientific disciplines. Nevertheless psychoanalysis has a specific
contribution to make to the study of aberrations in core gender identity
and in the established sense of one’s sexual role, in so far as these have
their roots in the experiences of early childhood and the unconscious
problems of parents.
The origins of sexual knowledge
It is well known that the genital organs, from the time that they form a
manifest mental representation in the mind of the small child, have a
special relationship with the visual discovery of the difference between
the sexes. The toddler’s eye, avid to acquire new knowledge, seizes very
early, usually between the twelfth and the eighteenth month of life, this
striking visible difference in the observable bodies of other children,
bodies which from this time onward are for ever identified sexually.
Children of both sexes display manifest anxiety about this surprising
discovery and this in turn brings about a reorganization of both their
relationship to and interest in their own bodies as well as in their play
activities (Roiphe and Galenson 1981). Until this disquieting revelation,
every child has an intuitive knowledge of its own sexual body, based on
the mother’s touch and the overall bodily contact with both parents, as
well as the coexcitation aroused by affective experiences, both pleasurable
and unpleasurable. But following the discovery of anatomical difference,
the genital suddenly becomes an object that can be pointed out and
named, and that marks you as belonging ineluctably to one clan only and
excluded for ever from the other. It is evident that this knowledge will
not be acquired without conflict, for the narcissistic and megalomanic
child inevitably wishes to possess both sexes as well as the powers and
236
THE DEAD FATHER 237
privileges attributed to the personalities and genital organs of each parent
(McDougall 1986a). Much psychic work is required in order to carry out
the task of mourning that will eventually allow the child to accept the
narcissistically unacceptable difference and assume its monosexual destiny.
In this respect I recall the analytic session of a 5-year-old on return
from a summer vacation, who rushed into the consulting room in a state
of evident excitement to announce an unusual event: ‘During the
holidays we were in a camp where all the kids bathed together, naked!’
‘You mean boys and girls together?’ Looking startled, he shouted: ‘Don’t
be stupid! How could I tell? I’ve already told you, they didn’t have their
clothes on!’
Faced with the scandalous evidence of humanity’s monosexual status
and its anxiety-arousing consequences, children are not the only ones to
maintain a split between knowing and not-knowing—the phenomenon
that Bion (1963) named ‘minus-K’. Certain adults also disavow and
render meaningless their biological sex—as witnessed in the extreme
remedies to which transsexuals of both sexes are willing to submit.
Others again, while accepting their biological sex as inescapable reality,
refuse the sexual role that society attributes to masculine or feminine
identity. This is the homosexual response to an internal conflict regarding
sexual role and object choice. The reasons for this deviation in gender
identity are various and highly complex. In part, the so-called
homosexual choice can be understood, in the light of psychoanalytic
experience, as a construction that is founded on what the child during its
formative years has interpreted of the parental discourse concerning the
significance to be attached to the mysterious difference, as well as the
model of a sexual couple that the parents unwittingly offer to the child’s
alert eye (McDougall 1978, 1982, 1986b). Thus the psychic
representation of the parental couple, as well as their words, may either
help or hinder the child in its attempt to give up universal wishes of both
a bisexual and an incestuous nature, and may indeed favour a deviant
representation of the small individual’s developing sense of core gender
and sexual identity role.
With the help of a clinical illustration, I hope to throw some light on
certain fundamental factors that contribute to sexual identity formation
and its inversions, in particular the importance of the different
identifications with both parents that essentially structure the sense of
sexual identity for all children. Here several psychic dramas intertwine:
the one to receive most attention in our psychoanalytic literature is the
heterosexual Oedipal crisis which involves, among other important
factors, the wish to possess in the most literal sense of the word the
parent of the opposite sex while wishing death upon the same-sex parent.
But there is also the homosexual Oedipal drama which also implies a
238 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
double aim, that of having exclusive possession of the same-sex parent and
that of being the parent of the opposite sex. This twofold dilemma has
been explored elsewhere (McDougall 1986a).
The lost father
The vignette that I am about to present raises a number of questions of
both a clinical and a theoretical order with regard to disturbance in sexual
identity, but before formulating these I should like to introduce my
patient and give a glimpse into our first meeting.
Benedicte grew up in a large city in the south of France where all her
close relatives also lived. A writer by profession, she sought help because
of an almost total blockage in her work. She felt unable to terminate a
novel she was working on in spite of considerable talent and the fact that
she had already gained a certain reputation for her writing. I opened my
waiting-room door to discover a woman who appeared to be in her
middle thirties: her face, framed by short curly hair, bore not a trace of makeup; her tight blue jeans and well-cut cashmere sweater revealed an
attractive feminine silhouette. She nodded gravely and walked into my
consulting-room in a hesitant manner. With extreme caution she
lowered herself into the chair facing mine, watching me all the while like
a sleuth-hound seeking to surprise in the eyes of the other some secret
knowledge. After a long moment’s silence she began to speak haltingly,
almost stammering, in a voice so soft that I had difficulty in hearing her.
She would stop abruptly in the middle of a sentence, as though unwilling
to allow her words to reach me, or as though each phrase had to be
checked before being uttered.
BENEDICTE: I don’t…er…don’t know if analysis can help…er …me.
Also I don’t…er…have confidence in it. But I read something…er…
written by…er…you. My writing… something’s wrong…I can no
longer…er…create…I don’t like that word…you might be able…er…
to help me.
I asked her what kind of help she had in mind.
B: Perhaps you could collaborate with…er…me…that is… er…I don’t
think it’s a real analysis that…er…I need…but someone like…er…
you…who writes as well.
J: But I’m an analyst rather than a writer.
B: I’m completely blocked…
J: Perhaps we might discover what is blocking you.
B: I’ve accomplished nothing in my life. I’m ashamed…er…to be still
alive…to have done so little. (Long pause) I shall be…er… forty next
week. (Another long pause) My…er…father died…at forty.
THE DEAD FATHER 239
Benedicte stared intently at me for some minutes in anguished
silence. In order to break it I made a meaningless comment.
J: So you have reached the age at which your father died.
B: Yes…but…I never knew him. I was only about fifteen months old at
the time. (A further long tense silence)
J: Perhaps people talked to you about him?
B: Yes…and…no. No one told me he was dead.
Benedicte stopped abruptly and appeared this time to sink into an
interminable silence. I began to feel ill at ease and to wonder if she
were suffering from some form of thought disorder. However, her
expression was most communicative, a desperate expression as though
no words could hope to transmit what she was feeling. In an attempt
to re-establish communication I remarked that it must be difficult to
talk of a father who one had the impression one had never known.
B: It’s just that my…er…mother hid his death from me. She always said
when I asked about him ‘He’s in the hospital’. She made everyone in
the family lie to me also. I was more than 5…when a neighbour…er…
told me the…the truth.
Benedicte did not believe that this discovery had upset her unduly.
(No doubt because she already knew the truth, for it seems unlikely
that a child of five would not have suspected that there was some
mystery about her supposedly alive but invisible father.) I thought to
myself that possibly the mother had invented the fiction of the
eternally ill father because she herself could not deal with her
bereavement and thus, to the little girl, the father’s death might have
been experienced as forbidden knowledge. Benedicte went on to say
that when she confronted her mother with the neighbour’s news her
mother burst into tears causing Benedicte to feel upset at having made
her suffer. She added that her mother never spoke to this neighbour
again. Benedicte’s thoughts now turned to a fictitious aspect of her
mother’s personality.
B: My mother’s an unreal person. Everything about her is false… even
her nose that she had remade. Whenever I was worried about
anything she’d say: ‘Don’t frown! You’ll get wrinkles on your
forehead.’ My worries didn’t interest her, only my appearance…er…
that is, only what the ‘others’ would think if they…er…saw me.
Benedicte frowned at me as though seeking to reasssure herself that
I would be more interested in her anxiety than her wrinkles.
B: She never understood why I didn’t want to be what she called… er…
feminine. We have nothing in common, my mother and I. She …er…
she can keep it…her…er…femininity! It’s totally inauthentic. Only
what she thinks the others think you’re supposed to be like. Her
infallible system for getting through life. (Long silence)
240 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
J: So you resisted her system?
B: I only like…er…authentic women.
There followed another extremely long mute interval before
Benedicte could continue.
B: To resemble her would have been…er…to stop existing… to
be…nothing.
Although Benedicte spoke slowly and softly, every word and every
bodily movement revealed an inexpressible tension. After much
hesitation she said she felt she had some difficult life-situations to face
and to resolve. She then asked if she might see me from time to time.
Sensing her extreme anxiety I proposed a second consultation for the
following week—the day of her fortieth birthday. She smiled and
replied gravely: ‘Thank you. I shall stay alive until then.’
At our second meeting Benedicte talked of her love-relationships,
the difficult ‘life-situations’ at which she had hinted the previous week.
B: There is a woman who has meant a great deal to me. Fredrika and I
have been lovers for many years—ever since the…er…death of her
husband. Her presence was always…vitally important to me. But now…
I’ve lost interest in the…er…passionate side of our relationship. We’re
still very close friends, and see each other every day …but I can’t bear
the pain that I’m causing her. And yet I can’t go back either…
Benedicte went on to describe a love relationship of the past three
years with Marie-Christine. She hid all knowledge of this friendship
from Fredrika, adding it was the first time she had ever deceived or
lied to her. Outwardly there appeared to be some similarity between
Benedicte’s two lovers. In each case it was the other woman who
initiated the love relationship. Both women were mothers and both
were widowed. Perhaps Benedicte read in my expression the thought
that a dead man always appeared on the scene in her life-story. In any
case she continued with a statement that could have been a negation
of my unspoken thought.
B: Neither of these two…er…important women in my life has the
slightest resemblance to my…er…mother.
Benedicte threw me a wary glance as though fearing I might not be
in agreement. A few weeks later, before regular sessions had begun,
she believed she had the proof of this. She had just bought a book on
female sexuality to which I had contributed a chapter entitled ‘On
homosexuality in women’ (McDougall 1964). Benedicte mentioned
this as soon as she arrived saying, with much stumbling and
circumlocution, that she disagreed with what I had written. I
encouraged her to express her criticism. (I might add that today I am
no longer in agreement myself with many of the ideas expressed in
this article written some twenty years ago. However, I still feel the
THE DEAD FATHER 241
importance I attributed to the role of the father in the girl’s inner
universe is pertinent.
B: You say that the…er homosexual girl has an idealized image of her…
er…mother as an unattainable model and therefore gives up all hope
of rivalry with her. I loathed my mother. No rivalry with her! As for
my…er…father, since I never knew him it’s improbable that he could
have been a model for me, beneficial or otherwise.
Indeed, in view of the parental images that Benedicte had brought to our
initial interviews (and of which I have given the salient features) she
appeared to be something of a psychic orphan. Her internal world, as she
presented it, was inhabited only by an ‘unreal’ mother regarded as a
mannequin and a dead father experienced as never having existed.
Although she was reticent about engaging in a ‘real analysis’ Benedicte
asked if she could come to see me regularly since she now had a clearer
vision of what she was seeking to discover about herself. Eventually the
analysis began on a four-times weekly basis and continued for eight or
nine years.
The notes of my first sessions with Benedicte and the questions they
aroused in my mind may be summarized under three major headings:
1 Would this psychoanalytic adventure be dedicated to the search for
the lost father? Early parent loss is almost inevitably traumatic. A fifteenmonth-old-child has little capacity to carry out the work of
mourning. Where, in a small child’s psyche, might we hope to find
the buried trace of a dead father?
2 How would a little girl of this age construct her image of her core
gender and sexual identity under the circumstances described by
Benedicte: a father presented to the growing child as alive but
invisible and a mother whose behaviour was interpreted by the
daughter to mean that she was little more than a mere narcissistic
extension of her mother?
3 What might Benedicte be able to teach me about the creative process
and its vicissitudes? When these give rise to work inhibitions, there
ensues a complicated inner drama that has interested me for a
number of years.
What constitutes psychic trauma?
The first question, of both clinical and technical interest, brings up the
issue of early psychic trauma and a traumatic event that is frequently
revealed in analytic practice. The number of patients in psychoanalytic
therapy whose fathers (whether due to abandonment or death)
242 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
disappeared during childhood appears to be greater than that found in the
population at large. Should this potentially traumatic disappearance occur
in early childhood it tends to be compensated by defensive structures that
are different from those constructed by the already verbal child.
Early psychic trauma of this kind plays an evident role in the life of
any child. It must nevertheless be emphasized that the long-range
traumatic impact of a catastrophic event depends to a large degree on the
parental reactions to the trauma in question. An event can be judged
traumatic (that is to say as having left lasting psychological scars) only to
the extent that the child’s psychic reality has been reorganized in such a
way as to prevent the return of the helpless state experienced at the time
of the traumatizing event. The way in which the potential trauma is
handled by the environment is therefore a crucial factor in determining
the extent to which the child will suffer future pathological consequences
(McDougall 1986c).
The fact that Benedicte’s father died unexpectedly when she was
fifteen months old, although it certainly contributed to her disturbed
sense of sexual identity, could not be considered as a sufficient
explanation. With regard to early parent loss it should also be emphasized
that a father who is dead may be carried within the child’s mind as a very
alive figure, depending on the mother’s way of talking about the father,
and on the nature of his own former relationship to the child.
Concomitantly, a father who is physically present might nevertheless be
lived as symbolically lost, absent or dead in the child’s inner world
depending once again on the father’s own personality and on the way the
mother invests and speaks of him to the child. In this respect it seemed
evident that Benedicte’s mother had not handled the father’s death in
such a way as to mitigate its traumatic potential for her daughter.
It should be added that the earlier a child is exposed to traumatic loss
of any kind the greater will be the tendency to over-invest the external
and the visible world, in the search for reassuring points of identification
to shore up a feeling of uncertainty with regard either to subjective or
sexual identity feeling. Thus, early psychic trauma stemming from the
parents’ unconscious problems, whether exacerbated or not by external
catastrophes, will frequently favour deviant sexuality in an attempt not
only to preserve the right to sexual and love relations in adult life but also
to stem a rising tide of panic at any threat to the feeling of subjective
identity. The individual concerned will sometimes feel compelled to seek
his or her own image in the mirror provided by another of the same sex.
The importance of the narcissistic dimension in homosexual relationships
is self-evident.
THE DEAD FATHER 243
On the origins of sexual identity
Question two, of a theoretical order, concerns the infantile roots of
sexual identity-feeling. What are the leading elements that contribute to
structure an individual’s representation of his or her own gender identity
and sexual role? These psychic acquisitions, as Freud was the first to point
out, cannot be taken for granted. They have to be created by the
growing child, using information received from the parents. A quarter of
a century in psychoanalytic practice, including the analysis of a number
of homosexual patients, has led me to give considerable weight to the
importance of the mother’s unconscious projections upon her infant in
the first year of life. These influence her ways of handling and talking to
her baby and her future wishes for this baby. Of crucial importance is the
place given to the baby’s father in the mother’s mind. From birth, babies
of both sexes begin to create intense sensuous and libidinal ties to both
parents. Every infant experiences in its mother’s arms the earliest schema
of sexual and love relationships to come and thus the beginnings of a
sense of sexual identity. The attitude of the tiny infant’s father is equally
vital to the transmission of early erotic investments. If the father’s
personality and sexuality are devalued or play little role in the mother’s
life, and if in addition the father himself is uninterested in his small
offspring and accepts being excluded, then there is a strong risk that he
may be leaving the infant to fulfil a role arising from the mother’s
unconscious problems. A mother who regards her baby as a narcissistic
extension of herself, or who puts her children in the place of their father
as her libidinal complement, may be laying the ground-work for future
deviant sexual development. If on the other hand children see their
parents as a loving couple who desire and respect each other, they will
tend to follow the parental model in their own adult sexual and love
lives. Even a mother who brings her children up alone will not
necessarily incur the risk of pathological maturation provided she does
not regard her children as a substitute for adult love relationships.
After the first year of life the endogenous perceptions of sexual
awareness become highly significant following the discernible difference
between boys and girls. Most authors who have dealt with the
establishment of gender identity (Stoller 1968; Roiphe and Galenson
1981) agree that the most critical period for the establishment of gender
identity occurs in the second half of the second year.
From this point of view my patient suffered the loss of her father at a
highly important period in the development of her sense of identity.
244 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Creativity and the integration of bisexual wishes
My third question arises from observations made over a number of years
with creative analysands (in artistic, scientific and other fields requiring
the capacity for original thought and imagination) whose work had
become sterile. Homosexual libido once deflected from its original
twofold aim (namely, to have the same-sex parent for oneself in a world
in which all members of the opposite sex are excluded, and to be the oppositesex parent with this parent’s genitals and supposed powers) finds many
paths of integration in the adult personality. It enriches not only each
individual’s narcissistic self-image but also the heterosexual loverelationship through identification with the pleasure of one’s partner.
Reflection has led me to the conviction that the creative process also
depends to a considerable extent on the integration of bisexual drives and
fantasies. Our intellectual and artistic creations are, so to speak,
parthenogenetically created children. A breakdown in the capacity to
work creatively frequently involves an interdiction concerning
unconscious homosexual identification, as well as unresolved conflicts
attached to the significant inner objects involved (McDougall 1986a).
One further point, the necessity for a writer to be able to identify
profoundly with characters of both sexes, has been immortalized by
Flaubert who, when questioned about the source of his inspiration in
writing Madame Bovary, replied: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’ An
unconscious refusal to become aware of and explore one’s capacity for
ambisexual identifications may well involve the risk of producing writer’s
block.
The beginning of the analytic adventure
Before quoting a few fragments from Benedicte’s analysis to illustrate the
above themes, I shall give an over-all impression of our first two years’
work together.
Benedicte became rapidly and intensely involved in her psychoanalytic
adventure, bringing dreams, day-dreams, thoughts and feelings with an
unusual richness of metaphor. At the same time her verbal expression was
laborious, stumbling and often inaudible or interspersed with long
periods of silence. Every gesture, every word was retained and carefully
checked before being released. In the early months of our work I did not
interpret the possible significance of this inaudibility, convinced as I was
that Benedicte could not communicate otherwise without doing violence
to her own way of relating to another human being. There were
glimpses also of a fantasy that any rapprochement between us was
potentially dangerous. Benedicte kept an avid eye on me as though
THE DEAD FATHER 245
drinking in my surroundings, but at the same time like a thirsty wanderer
searching the desert for fear that the oasis would become a mirage. Thus
she would suddenly break off her staring as she did her words. In a
painfully halting manner she would comment on the slightest
modification in the haphazard arrangement of a pile of reviews, or the
displacement of a lamp or an art object. The same close scrutiny was
applied to my appearance or the exact position of my chair in relation to
the couch. These infinitely small changes, of which I was rarely aware,
gave rise to timid but insistent questioning on Benedicte’s part. Faced
with my silence she constructed highly improbable theories to explain
the insignificant changes, usually leading to the conviction that ‘her
presence bothered me since I preferred to be with someone else or
engaged in some other occupation’. In other words, she constantly
sought some sign that would confirm the contrary, namely, that would
dispel her uncertainty as to whether her existence counted for me.
This incessant search for meaning, which, once found, resembled a
child’s reasoning, was of course intimately connected with her attempts
in the past to make sense out of her mother’s fabulations and incoherent
communications. Benedicte seemed to believe, much as psychotic
children tend to do, that she must discover the truth alone or otherwise
invent her version of the truth. This concerned not only her father’s
death but also her mother’s frequent absences, for once widowed,
Benedicte’s mother conducted a feverish search for a new mate.
Transposed on to the psychoanalytic stage, these preoccupations added
their weight to my patient’s difficulty in talking without having to chop
her phrases or muffle the sound of her voice.
Quite apart from the fantasy of danger attached to communication
with others, Benedicte was frightened of words in themselves. She
handled them like concrete objects capable of turning into dangerous
instruments. Her way of using language also created confusion as though
the interpenetration of primary and secondary process thinking that
leaves its mark on the free-associative analytic discourse was, in
Benedicte’s case, closer to dream-work.
The following notes, taken from two consecutive sessions in the third
year of our work together, give a glimpse into the relationship that my
patient maintained with a constraining and implosive representation of
her mother. At the same time, this vignette illustrates some of the reasons
for which all interchange with others, verbal or otherwise, filled
Benedicte with anxiety.
B: I dreamed that I was getting on a city bus. I had t…er…stamp a one-hundred
franc note that was for…er…you. But the machine was blocked. Something
246 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
was missing on the note. Someone behind me said ‘Go on! It’ll work’ and I…
er…woke up.
Benedicte’s associations, announced in a low stifled voice, led her to
think of her friend Fredrika and of the pleasure she felt in giving her
money for herself and her children, in spite of the fact that Benedicte
had little money for her own needs.
B: I…er…suppose I’d like to be the father of your family too …instead
all I can give you is money. But there’s something…er …missing. I
dare not imagine I could give you something more valuable.
J: This sounds like a certain image of your mother; you said it was
impossible to know what she really wanted from you.
B: Oh! She wanted me not to exist—outside of herself! The machine is in
my dream…it made a crunching noise as though it were chewing off a bit of the
note. ‘Oblitérer votre billet’ (cancel your ticket)—that’s what you have
to do as you get in the bus. I have trouble pronouncing that word
because it’s so violent. ‘Oblitérer’ only means stamp your ticket, but
it’s like stamping out, obliterating a person. Total destruction. That
machine is…my mother. The infernal, maternal machine.
Benedicte had easy access to her hatred of her mother as a
dangerous and destructive introject, but this got in the way of her
recognizing her own primitive wishes of a violent and destructive
kind, for she too is the ‘blocked machine’, as well as myself for whom
the note is intended. I therefore redirected her associations to the
transference situation.
J: But in the dream the destructive exchange took place between us.
B: That idea displeases me. Billet…billet-doux…I can recognize tender
feelings for you. But violence, even in words, hurts me.
Benedicte then goes on in a dream-like way to examine other
words and play on words associated with the dream images in which
violent, then erotic thoughts occurred in rapid succession. I
interpreted her fear that destructive and erotic desires might become
confused.
B: My mother made everything seem dirty. That’s why I couldn’t even
pronounce some of the words that came to mind just now. They had
to do with excrement.
Benedicte’s struggle with words
Benedicte’s chain of anal-erotic and anal-sadistic signifiers revealed classic
fantasies underlying infantile sexual theories. However, I did not
interpret these since her dominant anxiety at this point centred around
symbolic equivalents (Segal 1957) in which word and thing became
confused. (We see here certain factors that underlie speech defects.
THE DEAD FATHER 247
Although Benedicte did not suffer from stammering, a casual meeting
with her might have given this impression.) I pointed out to Benedicte
her fear of words.
B: You’re right. I’m as terrified of words as children are of ghosts.
At that moment I felt as though I too were meeting a ghost on
Benedicte’s psychoanalytic voyage. The strange silence that
surrounded her father, his never-mentioned illness and his zombie-like
existence that the mother’s fabulations had created in the little girl’s
mind continued on the analytic stage. I invited Benedicte to tell me
more about ‘ghost stories’ that children might fear.
B: Stories of people returning from the tomb always fascinated me for
some reason…especially those about ghosts with visible wounds that
still continued to bleed.
J: Do you have any particular ghost in mind?
B: Oh! You mean…him? yes…I think I waited for…him to come back.
Thus Benedicte was able to tell me at last, after three years of silence, the
cause of her father’s death. The word as well as its referent had seemed
until then literally unspeakable. Benedicte’s father died at the age of 40 of
a rectal cancer.
By the following session, Benedicte’s metaphors and the fantasies they
evoked in me were still vivid in my mind: an excited-and-terrified little
girl awaiting the return of her father from beyond the tomb: the father’s
death in terms of anal implosion; fantasies of the primal scene in
analsadistic terms; the conflictual dream-images in which traces of an
archaic primal scene may be detected in the meeting between the
machine and the hundred-franc note, a phallic-anal signifier in
Benedicte’s associations, and destined to be ‘obliterated’ while at the
same time representing a love-gift, the ‘billet-doux’. The session brought
some confirmation of these hypotheses as well as giving a glimpse into
new elements.
Benedicte began with an association concerning her distrust of verbal
communication and her urgent need to ‘close herself up’ against eventual
invasion from others.
B: My mother never took her eye off me. She believed she had the right
to know everything I did and everything I thought.
At this stage of our work together Benedicte could not accept that I
too might be experienced as an anally implosive and controlling
mother who watched her every gesture and her every word. When
this aspect of the transference became interpretable, and recognizable
to Benedicte herself, along with the exploration of the fantasies of
248 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
mutual destruction, she began for the first time to speak easily and
audibly, not only in the session but also with her friends who
commented on the fact that she no longer ‘mumbled’. (Fredrika had
always accused Benedicte of ‘swallowing her words’.)
B: As an adolescent I never dared open my mouth…as though my
mother might fly into it. And I could never close a door. She would
surge after me and throw it open. Even now, on my rare visits back
home she listens in to all my telephone conversations.
Underlying fantasies of oral as well as anal-sadistic penetration
became transparent. The little girl of the past had believed that it was
forbidden to close either the doors of her body or her mind against the
invasive representation of her mother. (A year later fantasies of her
mother killing the father in primitive oral and anal terms were able to
be reconstructed.)
B: My mother constantly tidied up after me. My papers, my notes, my
cigarettes were all put away the moment my back was turned. I would
no sooner get out of a chair than she rushed forward to smooth away
the trace of my body on the cushions. I was not to leave the slightest
sign of my presence.
The unwelcome trace
This question of the ‘trace’ and its effacement was destined to become a
leitmotif rich with significance.
B: Then I had to look at her too. She would put on a sort of erotic
spectacle for me, dressing and undressing in front of me, and asking
which of her clothes I found the most seductive and so on. This was
part of her ritual for catching a new husband. She would insist that
‘we’ must look nice, that ‘we’ must dress to impress eventual suitors.
Violence was the only way out. I closed myself off in stony silence.
She complained for years that I wouldn’t talk to her.
I asked Benedicte to tell me more about the fantasies of violence in
the face of her mother’s demands. Her associations led her to recount
hesitantly, and for the first time, some of her erotic fantasies.
B: This is the most exciting scene I can imagine…I’m a young man and
I’m having a violent sodomic relationship with a much older man.
My own associations went as follows: the fantasy of the father killed
through anal penetration is transformed into a scene in which the father
becomes a live and phallic representation while anal penetration becomes
erotically exciting and no longer mortally dangerous. The scene implies a
literal fantasy of incorporating the father’s penis and phallic strength,
THE DEAD FATHER 249
much as small children may imagine the narcissistic and libidinal
possession of their parents could take place. I then thought of the
predicament of a little girl of fifteen months whose father is suddenly
missing when she needs him. At this age most children turn to their
fathers in an attempt to detach themselves from their wish-for-and-fearof fusional dependence upon their mothers (Roiphe and Galenson 1981).
Thus, they strengthen not only their sense of subjective but also of sexual
identity. Where did Benedicte turn to accomplish this task?
J: You say the only response to your mother’s seductive attitude was
violence. Could the violent sodomy also be a way of protecting
yourself against her?
B: That reminds me. I had to hide all my childhood games from her …
Superman, Batman and the others were my constant companions. I
was always a boy amongst men. She would never have allowed that.
J: You had to hide your wish to be a boy as well as your wish to have a
man as a friend?
B: Yes…I’m beginning to see…this was the only way to have a secret
relationship with my father…in spite of her! If she’d found out she’d
have taken him away from me again. I used to spend hours dreaming
and writing stories about these powerful men who were my friends.
Oh, I’d forgotten…when I was adolescent I wrote what I called an
‘opera’. Months of work. Then one day the book disappeared from
my room. I never found it again. She destroyed it. It was something
that took me away from her.
The theme of Benedicte’s ‘opera’ was revealing. The whole action takes
place in a subway station. An all-male cast, the central characters were a
little boy, a gang of bad boys and a villainous old man. The little boy is
betrayed by the old man and, broken-hearted, at the end of the opera he
throws himself under a train! Benedicte linked the intriguing idea of
calling her play an opera to ‘operation’ fantasies of her father ‘in the
hospital’. She must surely have felt betrayed by the absent father who,
imprisoned in her mother’s words, gave her no sign of recognition or
remembrance. Did she have a little girl’s fantasy that her father, in
abandoning her, had castrated her? That he had left her to the mercy of
her mother so that she was driven to keep him alive in fantasy, in games
and, later, in her written stories? And was she able thus to maintain her
own feeling of integrity and identity?
250 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
The writer’s relation to words
I should like to emphasize at this point the extent to which words began
to reveal themselves in Benedicte’s analysis as the embodiment of
paternal power and presence.
In a sense this unconscious significance is true for everyone in that it is
through words that bodily perceptions and fantasies become organized as
verbal constructs, aiding the child to maintain a clear representation of
the difference between its own and its mother’s body. This becomes a
protection against the voice of the siren (rather than her words) since her
voice and presence awaken fantasies of the wish for fusion with the
consequent loss of both subjective and sexual identity. It seems evident
that the transitional objects of infancy (Winnicott 1951) give way to
language as an important internal possession, capable eventually of
replacing the need for the external object with thoughts about the object.
Thus, words always leave in the shadow not only the ‘thing’
presentation for which they are the symbol, but also half of the meaning
that they are purporting to transmit. In this sense they are doubly
symbolic. Over and beyond the essential importance of the role of
language in structuring the human psyche, for someone who is a writer,
words may come to play a specifically privileged role due to their link
with unconscious bisexual fantasies.
In Benedicte’s case, the paralysis of her creative possibilities
represented, among other aspects, an imaginary way of renouncing her
secret link with her father through language and story-building, a link
that was forbidden by her mother. In destroying her ‘opera’, Benedicte’s
mother may well have sensed in a confused way that this work
incorporated a serious rival and that her only child was escaping her. On
the psychoanalytic stage, as the image of the internal father slowly came
alive, mobilizing dynamic thoughts and fantasies in its wake, Benedicte
began to write again. Her first book published after the beginning of her
analysis led to her being invited to participate in a national television
programme devoted to present-day authors whose work attracts
attention. During this broadcast a member of the panel asked Benedicte a
question concerning the sophisticated and somewhat impalpable
impression conveyed by the novel. Benedicte replied: ‘It’s because…this
is a book written by a child.’
The father, loved and hated
However, the search for the lost father did not proceed easily, for there
was in Benedicte, as in every child, an internal father to be eliminated as
a stumbling-block to the illusory hope of taking full possession of the
THE DEAD FATHER 251
mother. In addition, the apparent determination of Benedicte’s mother
to create in her child’s mind an illusory family where only females
counted suggests that Oedipal interdictions were transmitted at an unduly
young age, perhaps before the age at which the sense of sexual identity is
normally well established. Thus, the mother’s unconscious fears and
wishes coincided with that part of the little Benedicte who wanted an
exclusive relationship with her mother. It was not surprising that dreams
and day-dreams came to light in which Benedicte herself was responsible
for the death of her father. A dream-theme that had persisted for many
years depicted her being pursued for a crime she had committed.
One day when Benedicte was struggling in a confused way with these
various internal fathers and mothers, I decided to interpret the different
‘I’s’ seeking to express themselves in her associations.
J: There are several Benedictes talking at the same time. First of all
there’s the little boy trying to keep alive an absent father, then the
young man who is protecting himself ‘violently’ from his omnipresent
mother. And then there’s the woman in you who seeks to repair
another woman with her love, as well as trying to be different in every
way from her own mother. But you seem to be having difficulty with
the little girl who longed for both her parents so that she might know
her place in the family—who she was, and for whom. You’re still
struggling with the incoherent images of your parents as a couple.
The latter statement aroused a massive reaction.
B: It’s absurd to hear you say ‘your parents’. No child ever wished for
two parents… In that way at least I was lucky. That little girl had no father!
Benedicte’s anger over my interpretation continued for many weeks
during which time she accused me of being the victim of social
bunkum, of second-hand ideas and of sentimentality over the death of
an unknown father.
The first ‘trace’ of mourning
An unforeseen incident provided us with the opportunity of crystallizing
the first trace of the dead father and the undoubtedly catastrophic
consequences of his sudden disappearance. One day, a sound from the
office next to my consulting-room alerted me to the fact that I had
forgotten to switch on my answering machine. For the first time in some
four years of analytic work with Benedicte, I got up in the middle of the
session and left the room.
252 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
B: While you were out I dreamed up an amusing scene. I had an impulse
to leave the room myself and began to imagine what you would think
on coming back and rinding the room empty.
J: What was I going to think?
B: Well first of all you wouldn’t be sure if I’d really been there or not
before you left the room. But then, just as I imagined myself running
away, I remembered that I’d left so quickly I’d forgotten my jacket on
the chair! So the whole scene was ruined.
Thinking of Benedicte’s mother who ‘could not tolerate the
slightest trace’ of Benedicte’s bodily presence, plus the sudden
disappearance of her father, I answered without reflecting.
J: You would have left a trace behind?
B: The jacket. His jackets! He must have left his jackets. My cousins told
me it was a lightning illness. No one expected him to die. The jackets …
I remember the smell of them. Not my father’s…my uncle’s. When I
was six or seven, after we went back to live with my grandmother, I
would spend hours playing in his wardrobe, smelling and touching his
jackets. It was one of my favourite games, but I was very careful to
hide it from my mother.
Later Benedicte came to tell me how, in her early adolescence, she
played for some years a game in which she imagined that it was her
job to select and buy men’s clothes for an important enterprise. She
would spend hours in clothing stores, examining the cut, the quality
and so on of the suits and jackets. When her adolescent girl-friends
pretended they were adult women picking out the clothes they would
buy for themselves, Benedicte would say that she was a married
woman and had to choose her husband’s clothes. She was well aware
that she did not dream of a future husband but was totally unaware
that she sought to keep alive a link with her lost father.
Thus we found the first signs of the work of mourning, instituted
by a small girl who sought some trace of her father through his
clothes, in the way that many children create their first transitional
objects, demanding to sleep with a handkerchief or piece of clothing
belonging to their mothers.
B: All my childhood games…I’ve never thought of their meaning nor
why they were different from other children’s games. I only knew that
my mother would disapprove. I had to play her games, not mine!
A recurring screen memory acquired additional poignancy around
this time.
B: Those two dolls that someone gave me when I was nearly three, a
boy and a girl…I only ever played with the boy, talking to him,
dressing and undressing him…then one day my mother said they
needed repairing. When they came back, both were girls. The boy…
THE DEAD FATHER 253
my mother killed him! I still recognized him by a tiny little trace, but I
never touched the dolls again.
Shortly after the session in which Benedicte announced the assassination
of the boy-doll, a new version of her repetitive crime-dream came forth
in which she was merely the witness.
Benedicte dreamed that she watched a scene in which a man was killed in a
neighbour’s kitchen.
Her associations led her to think of the film La Grande Bouffe in which a
dead man is laid out amidst the food that has been prepared for the
funeral celebration. The principal characters were men but Benedicte
sought to remember the role of the woman in this film. Her various
associations to the dream and the film led me to suggest that as a little
child she had perhaps believed that her mother had killed her father by
devouring him.
This interpretation created a shock-effect and led Benedicte to bring
forth a stream of memories…of mother eating more than her share of
Benedicte’s ice-creams, or displaying lengthily her constant digestive and
eliminatory problems.
The following day Benedicte brought another dream in which
heterosexual desire and love would lead to death. For some time she had
talked of her strong attraction to and admiration for a young man who
was a clarinet-player. Although the attraction appeared to be shared,
Benedicte forbade herself any realization of her desire on the grounds of
her friend’s age and the fact that she had known his mother in the past
which she felt made him something like a son. In other words she lived
the relationship as an incestuous one. Here is the dream.
B: I was admiring a rare and beautiful bird…it was enclosed in a clarinet. I
watched it with fascination. Then I turned to tell you about it and saw on your
face a look of absolute horror, because the bird was being crushed inside the
musical instrument. His blood was flowing through all the holes and his body
was being torn to pieces. I realized suddenly that he was going to die and… I
woke up.
A chain of associations formed in my own mind while listening to
Benedicte’s account of her dream: the bird whose body was being
crushed while it lost its blood through the holes seemed to point to
fantasies of the father’s rectal cancer and death, and was confirmed in a
sense by the incest taboo associated in Benedicte’s mind with the
young clarinet-player. The instrument then became a dream
representation of Benedicte’s own sex as an organ that would be
254 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
dangerous for any man she desired. Once again there is a glimpse into
a strange and terrifying primal scene, as imagined by a child. My role
in the dream is to reveal its horror to Benedicte. Her associations took
this as their starting-point.
B: My first thought…I want you to shock me, perhaps batter my mind,
with your interpretations. Like yesterday…about my mother having
killed my father by eating him.
Thus Benedicte now invites me to commit violence; through my
words I am to embody the castrative and murderous image that the
small Benedicte of the past attributed to her mother. While examining
her transference feelings, Benedicte began to think of her own
violence and fierce jealousy of my other patients, as well as her anger
at having discovered my husband’s name on a letter-box at the
entrance to my building.
B: In fact I want to be not only your sole patient but the only person in
your life.
J: To devour me?
B: Yes…to crush the life out of you. I’m…exactly like my mother!
We see here that the phallic castration represented in the dream
hides a prototypic castration-fantasy in which life itself is endangered.
B: Under the mask of love my mother sucked the blood from my veins…
and I’m shocked to discover that there’s a part of myself that wants to
do exactly that with the people I love. But there’s something different.
In love I refined my body through the body of another woman,
provided she herself loves her body and takes pleasure in love-making.
Then there’s no murderous exchange. That’s one thing my mother
did not manage to crush and obliterate.
Benedicte remained silent as she reflected over the changing images
in the dream and the thoughts that followed. Just before the end of
the session she posed, for the first time, the following question.
B: But whose body do I live in?
Her father’s? Her mother’s? Which is hers? Here my patient touched
upon her confusion since childhood as to her sexual identity and even
her identity as a separate individual. A final fragment from her analysis
may serve to illustrate the theme of sexual identity as it relates to a small
child’s identification to both parents. In Benedicte’s case, the task was
rendered more difficult due to the specific circumstances in which the
sudden loss of her father had constituted an early psychic trauma that
could not be elaborated mentally because Benedicte’s mother herself was
unable to deal with it. The following sessions were noted in the fifth year
of our work together.
THE DEAD FATHER 255
Benedicte’s transformation
B: I study you attentively…your way of holding yourself…the way you
walk and sit…your clothes, your hair style, your make-up…
I asked her what she sought to learn from this careful study.
B: I want to know how you see yourself as a woman…and what it feels
like to be a woman. I don’t know what a woman is…nor a man
either. This weekend I tried, for the first time in five years, to imagine
your body under your clothes.
There followed a heavy silence as though Benedicte were afraid to
continue. I also was struck by her emphasis on the ‘five years’,
thinking of the secret calendar we all carry in our preconscious minds,
and of the fact that Benedicte was 5 years old when the truth of her
father’s death could no longer be denied.
B: But I could not go any further with the thought of your body, as
though…I were afraid you would…disapprove.
J: What would I disapprove of?
B: The idea comes to me that you might have something to hide. (A long silence)
J: And what am I hiding?
B: Something like…a mutilation…or a shameful deformity.
The fact that on several occasions we had already discussed the
fantasy of woman as a castrated man led me to feel that the present
associations had to do with something more primitive, or more
specific to Benedicte, than the quasi-universal fantasy of feminine
‘castration’. I invited her therefore to try to imagine further the nature
of my deformity.
B: It’ll be difficult to tell all my thoughts since last Friday…things I have
carefully avoided telling from the very beginning of my analysis.
Benedicte then went on to recount that her friend Marie-Christine
had once told her, many years ago, that Benedicte’s pubic hair was
distributed in a masculine way. Her lover claimed she found it
attractive, but it evoked in Benedicte a feeling of explosive rage and
hatred towards her. She had suffered all her life from an impression
that her body was monstrous and, as she put it, ‘ambiguous’ and that it
had become more so as she advanced into adulthood. MarieChristine’s words suddenly confirmed this fantasy.
B: That’s the reason I always wear tight-fitting jeans and clinging
sweaters…if anything is floating around my body it might give the
impression I have something to hide…as though my female shape
might not be evident or as though I might be afflicted with a man’s
sex… even if I may have wished this as a child, it’s certainly not true
today. But the sudden appearance of these secondary sexual
characteristics is just as terrifying to me. I’ve not worn shorts or a
256 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
bathing suit for over ten years and I’ve given up swimming and
sunbathing altogether.
In reply to a question on my part concerning the ‘sudden’
appearance of this masculine pubic hair Benedicte explained in detail
that as far as she could make out it had occurred shortly after the death
of Fredrika’s husband. For a number of years before his (quite
unexpected) death Benedicte, knowing Fredrika was very unhappy
with her husband, desired ardently to take his place, and had
frequently imagined ways of killing him. She had often wondered
since then whether the shock of his actual death may have produced
this hormonal change. Just before the end of this session I pointed out
to Benedicte that she had talked of her own feeling of being mutilated
but had not been able to explore further her fantasy of my shameful
deformity. The thought that our bodies were both feminine and could
be compared apparently gave Benedicte the feeling, after the session,
that she had a right to study her own body in more detail, perhaps in
the manner of a little girl seeking to gleam knowledge about her
feminine self from her mother’s body and way of being.
B: Last night I tried to imagine your body and to grasp what was so
forbidden about this thought. This allowed me to stand in front of the
mirror and for the first time in ten years look at myself in the nude.
Would you believe it—there’s nothing at all wrong with my pubic
hair. Absolutely nothing! It isn’t the neat and pretty triangle it could
be, but there’s no hint of anything masculine. And to think of all those
years I have hidden my monstrosity from everybody!
We then spent some time examining Benedicte’s conflictual feelings
following the death of Fredrika’s husband. On the one hand, a
husband had to die before she could feel sure of her place in the
world; in her imagination this would allow her to possess her own
femininity through the femininity of the other woman. At the same
time, a deeply unconscious fantasy prompted her to seek any possible
trace of a living father-figure that she could keep as a vital part of
herself. In her total illusory ‘hormonal change’, she had carried out a
fantasy of incorporating the dead husband of her lover. As a very small
child she would seem to have believed that she had become her lost father
by a similar process of primitive internalization. In seeking to possess the
mental representation of two parents capable of conferring upon her
the status of subjective and of sexual identity, it appeared that the price
to be paid was her own castration—the loss of her femininity.
B: You were the first person ever to tell me that I had had two parents. I
now see that I had kept traces of my father alive everywhere, both
outside and inside myself.
THE DEAD FATHER 257
Indeed this seemed to me to be profoundly true, for Benedicte’s
professional life as well as her love-life were both living monuments to
her dead father.
B: And I also thought that you, or any woman, should be wary of me …
because I do not possess my own female body. It’s only through the
body of another woman that I regain mine.
J: In order to possess your own body, in order to be a woman, you have
to dispossess me? There cannot be two women?
I thought to myself that unconscious identifications are something
like one’s liberty. The latter cannot be handed out with permission;
one has, at some time, to reach out and assume it for oneself. It
requires the sexual representation of two parents in order to acquire a
firm sense of one’s own sexual identity, but the confusing and
traumatic circumstances that surrounded Benedicte’s understanding of
what constituted her own sexual identity had left her with only partial
identifications concerning her gender and sexual role.
B: Yes! it’s as though I have to take something away from you but I
don’t know why. Also I still can’t imagine what your deformity might
be…but I had an important thought about that. I said to myself that I
love you and that no matter what monstrosity or what bodily
deformity you might hide, it would make absolutely no difference to
my feelings for you.
J: In other words you have never been sure that this is also true for you…
that you too could be loved no matter what body, no matter what sex,
you have?
There followed an astonished silence before Benedicte was able to
reply and when she did her voice trembled through her tears.
B: How strange…I never believed I could be loved, with my body, with
my sex…just as I am…just because I am…me.
I shall leave the story of Benedicte’s analysis at this point, simply adding
that, among other changes, her analysis permitted her to refind and truly
liberate her creative potential. Within a relatively short span of time
Benedicte produced several intense and fascinating works and I feel
confident that this creative source will not dry up again in the future. She
also found the courage to ask her mother to give her more details of her
father and her relationship with him before his death. The mother
replied that it could not possibly have any meaning for Benedicte because
children of that age are unaware of their fathers! She did however add, in
the face of Benedicte’s insistence that her father had been the one who
principally cared for her when she was teething or restless in her sleep.
He also frequently helped with her bodily care, since he did not suffer, as
did her mother, from any repugnance about soiled diapers. ‘There you
258 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
were, so excited, jumping up and down at the sight of him, with your
diaper full of shit, and he would grab you up and hold you in his arms as
though it didn’t matter. You see, he wasn’t a classical father.’
Concluding remarks
In this paper my primary object has been to trace, with the aid of a
pertinent clinical example, the early elements that contribute to the
origins of one’s sense of sexual identity and the factors that may hinder
the psychic process essential to the establishment of a secure sense of core
gender and sexual role. These include identifications to both parents and
therefore require the capacity to resolve the universal bisexual and
incestuous wishes of childhood as well as institute the mourning
processes needed to assume one’s monosexuality without neurotic,
characterological or sexual distortions. The integration of the bisexual
longings of childhood enriches the personality in many ways,
strengthening one’s narcissistic self-image and sense of sexual identity, as
well as contributing to the capacity to be creative in intellectual, scientific
or artistic fields. In the clinical illustration to these themes, the role of
early psychic trauma played an essential role for Benedicte who lost her
father at the age of fifteen months and was thus left a prey to her
mother’s internal confusions and inability herself to face the traumatic
loss of her husband. Her attempt to deny that the father had ever truly
existed for her daughter had forced the latter to accomplish a magical
mourning for her lost father by, in a sense, becoming him.
It is my hope that I have been able to communicate something of the
struggle that a little girl, in traumatizing circumstances, felt obliged to
maintain, in order to protect her feeling of identity and her sexuality.
Perhaps this analytic vignette might at the same time throw some light
upon the struggle of every little girl in her attempt to safeguard her sense
of integrity and the conviction of her personal and sexual value.
Summary
This paper explores the origins of two clinical phenomena which are
frequently related in analytic practice, namely sexual deviancy and
inhibition in creative or intellectual work. The analysands in question
seek psychoanalytic help not for their sexual acts and object-choices but
because of blockage in their professional activities.
In the author’s opinion the roots of both sexual deviancy and creativity
may often be traced back to early psychic trauma. The sexual ‘solution’
and the creative activity both represent ways of attempting to overcome
the traumatic situation of infancy.
THE DEAD FATHER 259
These propositions are illustrated by the case of an author who sought
help because her writing was completely blocked and because her
homosexual love relations caused tension and concern. The sudden death
of her father when she was fifteen months old and her mother’s disturbed
way of handling the tragic situation were decisive factors in both the
patient’s sexual and professional life.
References
Bion, W. (1963). Elements of Psychoanalysis. London: Heinemann.
McDougall, J. (1964). Homosexuality in women. In Female Sexuality: New
Psychoanalytic views, ed. J.Chasseguet-Smirgel. Ann Arbor Michigan Univ.
Press. 1970.
——(1978). Plea for a Measure of Abnormality. New York: Int. Univ. Press, 1982.
——(1982). Theatres of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
——(1986a). Eve’s reflection: on the homosexual components of female
sexuality . In Between Analyst and Patient, ed. H.Meyers. New York:
Analytic Press.
——(1986b). Identifications, neoneeds and neo-sexualities. Int. J.
Psychoanal., 67:19–31.
——(1986c) Parent loss. In The Reconstruction of Trauma, ed. A.Rothstein.
New York: Int. Univ. Press.
Roiphe, H. and Galenson, E. (1981). Infantile Origins of Sexual Identity. New
York: Int. Univ. Press.
Segal, H. (1957). Notes on symbol formation. Int. J. Psychoanal., 38:391–7.
Stoller, R. (1968). Sex and Gender. New York: Jason Aronson.
Winnicott, D.W. (1951). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena.
In Collected Papers. New York: Basic Books, 1958.
12
Dis-identifying from mother: its special
importance for the boy
RALPH R.GREENSON
The early psychoanalytic literature stressed the special problems the little
girl has to overcome in order to achieve a satisfactory sex life and the
capacity to love. The female child must work through two important
conflictual areas from which the male is spared. She must shift her major
erogenous zone from the clitoris to the vagina and must renounce the
mother as her primary love object and turn to the father and men (Freud
1925, 1931, 1933, 1940). The purpose of this presentation is to focus
attention on a special vicissitude in the normal psychological
development of the boy which occurs in the pre-Oedipal years. I am
referring to the fact that the male child, in order to attain a healthy sense
of maleness, must replace the primary object of his identification, the
mother, and must identify instead with the father. I believe it is the
difficulties inherent in this additional step of development, from which
girls are exempt, which are responsible for certain special problems in the
man’s gender identity, his sense of belonging to the male sex.
The girl too must dis-identify from mother if she is to develop her
own unique identity, but her identification with mother helps her
establish her femininity. It is my contention that men are far more
uncertain about their maleness than women are about their femaleness. I
believe women’s certainty about their gender identity and men’s
insecurity about theirs are rooted in early identification with the mother.
I am using the term ‘dis-identify’ in order to sharpen my discussion
about the complex and interrelated processes which occur in the child’s
struggle to free himself from the early symbiotic fusion with mother. It
plays a part in the development of his capacity for separationindividuation, to use Mahler’s terminology (Mahler 1963, 1965; Mahler
and La Perriere 1965). The male child’s ability to dis-identify will
determine the success or failure of his later identification with his father.
These two phenomena, dis-identifying from mother and counteridentifying with father, are interdependent and form a complementary
series. The personality and behaviour of mother and father also play an
260
DIS-IDENTIFYING FROM MOTHER 261
important and circular role in the outcome of these developments
(Mahler and La Perriere 1965). The mother may promote or hinder the disidentifying and the father does the same for counter-identification.
I became alerted to the possibility of some special difficulty in the
development of the male’s gender identity from a variety of clinical
experiences. I have been working for five years in a research project at
the University of California at Los Angeles studying transsexuals, people
who wish to undergo surgery in order to change their anatomical sex.1
These patients are normal biologically, and are not psychotic; but they
are convinced that they belong mentally and emotionally to the opposite
sex. (Incidentally, they abhor homosexuality.) On the basis of the
prevalence of women’s penis envy and men’s contempt of women in our
society, I had expected that most of the transsexual patients would be
women wanting to become men. Instead, the study of a hundred cases
over a nine-year period revealed that between two-thirds and threequarters were men hoping to become women (Stoller 1964). Similar
studies by others indicate an even higher ratio (Pauly 1965; Benjamin 1966).
These patients are a very select and small group and perhaps not a
reliable indicator of the male’s greater discontent with his gender
identity. The fact that transvestitism is almost exclusively a male disease
and more widespread than commonly believed, is a more impressive
testimonial for man’s dissatisfaction with maleness and his wish to be a
female. Furthermore, my own clinical experience with relatively healthy
neurotics in psychoanalysis also points in the same direction. It is true
that my female patients envy men in a variety of ways, particularly their
possession of a penis, as well as their greater social, economic and
political advantages. However, I am impressed by the fact that on an
earlier, more deeply unconscious level, my male patients harbour an
intense envy of the female, particularly the mother. Each sex is envious
of the opposite sex; but the male’s more covert envy underneath his
external façade of contempt, seems to be particularly destructive in regard
to his gender identity (Bettelheim 1954; Greenson 1966b).
I can illustratre this point by the following material: my men patients
frequently reveal a history of putting on some female undergarment in
their masturbatory activities as a sign of their fantasy of being a woman. I
do not recall any female patient describing anything analogous. This may
well be related to the fact that fetishism is also almost 100 per cent a male
disease. Even neurotic women who imagine they are enacting male,
phallic activities in the sexual act, usually visualize themselves as women
with a penis, not as men. (The overt ‘butch’ homosexual is a special
problem and beyond the limits of this paper.)
It is my clinical impression that the dread of homosexuality in the
neurotic, which is at bottom the fear of losing one’s gender identity, is
262 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
stronger and more persistent in men than in women (Greenson 1964).
Observations of the current social scene also demonstrate that men are far
more uncertain about their masculinity than women are of their
femininity (Mead 1949). Women may doubt their attractiveness but they
are quite sure of their femaleness. Women feel at their most feminine in
the company of the opposite sex, whereas men feel at their most
masculine in the presence of men. Furthermore, as women have become
sexually more assertive and demand equal orgasms along with their other
equal rights, men seem to have become sexually more apathetic and
lethargic (Greenson 1966b).
Let me return to the problem of the male’s envy of woman. I believe
that envy is one of the main driving forces in man’s wish to be a woman
and originates in the early envy all children feel towards the mother. The
Kleinians have attempted to explain this on the basis of the infant’s envy
of the mother’s joy—and security—giving the breast (Klein 1957).
Although I do not deny this explanation, it nonetheless neglects other
important factors which seem to explain better the difference in the envy
of men and women.
The general clinical findings sketched above were the starting point for
my deliberations about the role of the boy’s early identification with the
mother and the importance of his ability to dis-identify from her. In my
work with a ‘transsexual-transvestite’ 5½-year-old boy, Lance, I had an
opportunity to observe the problem of dis-identifying at first hand
(Greenson 1966a).
This lively, intelligent, well-orientated boy was highly disturbed in
two major interrelated areas of his development. In the first place, he had
not made that step in the maturational process which enables one to
distinguish loving someone from identifying with someone. As a
consequence, he was consumed by the wish to be a female: he acted and
dressed as a girl. This was not an obsession or compulsion but an allconsuming wish that approached a conviction, a delusion. If Lance had
not been treated, I believe he would have become either a full-fledged
transsexual or a transvestite, in order to fulfil this conscious wish. (In
homosexuals this wish is unconscious.)
In the presentation of this case at Amsterdam Congress, I described
how Lance dressed up his ‘Barbie’ doll as a princess and went to a ball
with her and how he danced her around the ballroom very joyously.
When I followed the princess and told her how beautiful she was, how
much I wanted to hold her and dance with her, and that I loved her,
etc., Lance finally said to me, ‘Go ahead, you can be the princess.’ I
replied, ‘I don’t want to be the princess, I want to dance with her.’ Lance
was baffled. I repeated this several times until the boy permitted me to
dance with the princess. He watched this, puzzled and upset. Finally he
DIS-IDENTIFYING FROM MOTHER 263
asked me if I dance with my wife, love my wife, etc. I said ‘Yes, I do.’
The boy left the session deep in thought.
Shortly after this episode, Lance no longer referred to the Barbie doll
as ‘I’ or ‘we’ but only as ‘she’. Soon after that he rarely played with
Barbie and when he did there was a sexual element in the play which
had not been present before. From this time onward he developed a
strong identification with me and then with his father. For the first time
Lance manifested behaviour which indicated he was unmistakably in the
phallic Oedipal phase.
I believe that Lance’s central problem was his inability to complete his
separation-individuation from his mother. Lance’s mother was extremely
possessive and gratified him excessively in terms of tactile and visual
contact. In addition, the mother hated and disrespected her husband and
men in general. I was an exception. The father was afraid of his wife and
a failure in his work. He was absent from the home a great deal and had
little if any pleasurable contacts with the boy. In my opinion, although
Lance was able to develop a self-representation as distinct from object
representation, this failed when it came to establishing a realistic gender
identity.
It is precisely in this area that I believe the boy’s capacity to disidentify himself from his mother is of paramount importance. The girl
can acquire feminine characteristics by means of her identification with
the mother. Her femaleness is practically assured if she is raised by a
female mothering person. The boy has a more difficult and far less certain
path to pursue. He must dis-identify from mother and identify with a
male figure if he is to develop a male gender identity. Greenacre
(1958:618) hints at this point when she states that women seem to show
more frequent but less gross disturbances in this area. Jacobson (1964) also
raises the question of why women do not develop more identity
problems than men. I believe that both authors are touching on the same
issues I am trying to delineate—the boy’s special problem of disidentifying from mother and forming a counter-identification with father.
I would like to pursue this last point in a little more detail, although
the limitations of space will only permit an outline of the subject. I
believe that we would all agree that in early infancy both girls and boys
form a primitive symbiotic-identification with the mothering person on
the basis of the fusion of early visual and tactile perception, motor
activity, introjection and imitation (Freud 1914, 1921, 1923, 1925;
Fenichel 1945; Jacobson 1964). This results in the formation of a
symbiotic relationship to the mother (Mahler 1963). The next step in the
development of ego-functions and object relations is the differentiation
of self-representation from object representations. Mahler (1957),
Greenacre (1958), Jacobson (1964) and others have elucidated how
264 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
different forms of identification play a central role in this transition as
maturation makes it possible to progress from total incorporation to
selective identifications. The capacity to differentiate between similarities
and contrasts eventuates in the capacity to discriminate between inside
and outside and ultimately the self and the non-self. In this process, the
child learns he is a distinct entity, different from mother, dog, table, etc.
However, he also gradually learns by identification to behave and
perform certain activities like the mothering person, such as speaking,
walking, eating with a spoon, etc. These activities are not duplications,
but are modified in accordance with the child’s constitution and his
mental and physical endowment. The style of his behaviour and activities
are further changed by his later identifications with others in the
environment. What we call identity seems to be the result of the
synthesis and integration of different isolated self-representations
(Jacobson 1964; Spiegel 1959).
I would now like to focus on one aspect of these developments—the
development of the gender identity. The formation of one’s gender
identity is still relatively nebulous. In a previous presentation (Greenson
1964), I suggested three factors which play a role in this process: (a)
awareness of the anatomical and physiological structures in oneself,
according to Greenacre (1958), primarily the face and the genitals; (b) the
assignment to a specific gender, done by the parents and other important
social figures, in accordance with the overt sexual structures: (c) a
biological force which seems to be present at birth. To verify these
points, I can state that in our Gender Identity Clinic, I have seen boys
who behaved completely boyishly despite the fact that they were born
without a penis and no visible testes. They were treated like boys by
their parents and this seemed to be decisive. We have seen many pseudohermaphrodites in this clinic who live their life in a biologically false
gender role without any manifest doubts about their identity. Yet we also
know that in some children there seems to be a biological force which is
strong enough to counteract their overt anatomy and the parent’s
assignment of sex (Stoller 1964). This is rare and does not represent a
typical outcome. Clinically, all three factors interact to establish one’s
sense of gender.
I believe that a fourth factor must be added, in the boy, to those
already mentioned. I am referring to the dis-identifying from mother and
his developing a new identification with the father. This is a special
problem because the boy must attempt to renounce the pleasure and securitygiving closeness that identification with the mothering person affords,
and he must form an identification with the less accessible father. The
outcome will be determined by several elements. The mother must be
willing to allow the boy to identify with the father figure. She can
DIS-IDENTIFYING FROM MOTHER 265
facilitate this by genuinely enjoying and admiring the boy’s boyish
features and skills and must look forward to his further development
along this line (A.Freud 1965).
The other vital component in this switch of identification in the boy
consists of the motives the father offers for identifying with him. Lance
(Greenson 1966a) did not identify with his father because his father was a
frightened, joyless man. There was little motive for identifying with him.
The essential therapeutic part of his work with me was his eagerness to
identify with me because I seemed to him to enjoy life and to be
unafraid. Later on, when his father improved from his own
psychotherapy, Lance did identify with the father. I should add that part
of the motivation to identify with the father stems from the mother’s
love and respect for the father. Identification based on other grounds
seem to be less reliable (A.Freud 1965).
The questions which now arise are the following: What happens to
the original identification with mother, after the boy has identified with
father? Does the identification with mother disappear, its place taken by
the new identification? Does it remain but become latent because it is
superseded in importance by the identification with father? How much
of the boy’s identification with the father is a counter-identification,
actually a ‘contra’-identification, a means of counteracting the earlier
identification? Is it not in this area where we can find an answer to why
so many men are uncertain about their maleness? Perhaps it is the shaky
basis of their identification with the father, their contra-identification,
which makes them so reactively contemptuous of women and so
envious, unconsciously. Perhaps the mothers of fifty years ago who
dressed and combed their boys as girls intuitively recognized that one had
to gratify each phase of the child’s development in order to ensure his
future maturation. By satisfying the boy’s early need to identify with
mother, he was better able to make the later step of identifying with father.
I realize I have raised more questions than I have answered, but I hope
future work and discussion will bring greater clarification to this
important area.
Notes
Presented at the 25th International Psycho-Analytical Congress,
Copenhagen, July 1967. The author is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry,
UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California; Scientific Director,
Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis, Beverly Hills, California.
1 Gender Identity Research Project, Robert Stoller, M.D., Director, UCLA
School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California.
266 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
References
Benjamin, H. (1966). The Transsexual Phenomenon. (New York: Julian Press.)
Bettelheim, B. (1954). Symbolic Wounds. (Illinois: The Free Press.)
Fenichel, O. (1945). The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. (New York: Norton.)
Freud, A. (1965). Normality and Pathology in Childhood. (New York: Int.
Univ. Press.)
Freud, S. (1914). ‘On narcissism: an introduction.’ S.E., 14.
——(1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. S.E. 18.
——(1923). The Ego and the Id. S.E., 19, 3
——(1925). ‘Negation.’ S.E., 19.
——(1931). ‘Female sexuality.’ S.E. 23.
——(1933). New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. S.E., 22.
——(1940). An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. S.E. 23.
Greenacre, P. (1958). ‘Early physical determinants in the development of
the sense of identity.’ J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 6.
Greenson, R. (1964). ‘On homosexuality and gender identity.’ Int. J. PsychoAnal., 45.
——(1966a). ‘A transvestite boy and a hypothesis.’ Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 47.
——(1966b). ‘The enigma of modern woman.’ Bull. Philadelphia Assoc.
Psychoanal., 16.
Jacobson, E. (1964). The Self and the Object World. (New York: Int. Univ. Press.)
Klein, M. (1957). Envy and Gratitude. (London: Tavistock.)
Mahler, M. (1957). ‘On two crucial phases of integration concerning
problems of identity: separation-individuation and bisexual identity.’
Abstracted in Panel on Problems of Identity, reported by Rubinfine. J.
Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 6.
——(1963). ‘Thoughts about development and individuation.’ Psychoanal.
Study Child, 18.
——(1965). ‘On the significance of the normal separation-individuation
phase.’ In: Drives, Affects, Behavior, Vol. 2, ed. Schur. (New York: Int.
Univ. Press.)
Mahler, M., and La Perriere, K. (1965). ‘Mother-child interaction during
separation-individuation.’ Psychoanal. Quart., 24.
Mead, M. (1949). Male and Female. (New York: Morrow.)
Pauly, I. (1965). ‘Male psychosexual inversion: transsexualism.’ Arch. Gen.
Psychiatr., 13.
Spiegel, L. (1959). ‘The self, the sense of self, and perception’. Psychoanal.
Study Child, 14.
Stoller, R. (1964a). ‘A contribution to the study of gender identity.’ Int.J. PsychoAnal., 45.
——(1964b). ‘Female (vs. male) transvestism.’ Unpublished paper presented
before the American Psychoanalytic Association, May 1964.
13
Clinical notes on the identification with the
little girl
MARILIA AISENSTEIN
Beguiling and bewitching, the little girl appears throughout Freud’s
writing. She has a special place in it: is it not the vision of her which
leads to the discovery of castration? She lays down forever the roots of
primal fantasy.
In literature, from Perrault to Nabokov by way of Grimm and
Andersen, small girls elicit complex feelings. Out of a dream or fantasy
arises all the ambiguity and the overdetermination of the seductive
image. The ‘Rat Man’ has a day-dream which stages a little girl cutting
the link between the two partners of the same sex.1
The patient from whom I take my material came to analysis because
he had become the father of a little girl. In the course of three sessions, I
thought I could read a particular destiny in his identification with the
small girl: it grants him a reunion in the transference with an as yet
undifferentiated object relation, under cover of which he will be able to
tackle a homosexuality that had been put in second place and intolerable
up till then.2
This man is extremely virile in appearance, and does not have the backup of a homosexual pragmatism, nor even that of a ‘phobia, or at least of
a fear of being homosexual, constituted and felt as such. Yet
homosexuality, in its most diverse modes, infiltrates his entire neurotic
organization, including some costly failures such as moments of violence
or acts of delinquency.
His childhood was an odd one. His family constellation is strangely
similar to the one Freud describes in ‘A childhood memory of Leonardo
da Vinci’:
Leonardo’s childhood was remarkable in precisely the same way as this
picture. He had had two mothers: first, his true mother Caterina, from
whom he was torn away when he was between three and five, and
then a young and tender stepmother, his father’s wife, Donna Albeira.
By his combining this fact about his childhood with the one
267
268 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
mentioned above (the presence of his mother and grandmother) and
by his condensing them into a composite unity, the design of ‘St Anne
with Two Others’ took shape for him.3
I will give my patient the name Leonard, not only because of this
similarity and the interest of this text from 1910 for a psychoanalytical
understanding of homosexuality, but also following some different
associative voices, of which one is his constitution in analysis of a sublimation.
To illustrate the avatars of his feminine identification, it does not much
matter, I think, that my patient is not homosexual, for perverse activity
often constitutes an escape outside the physical field which masks4—
more than it illuminates—the identificatory levels constituted around
Oedipal structuring and the two moments of castration.
The sequence presented here takes place around the beginning of the
third year of treatment. Leonard committed himself to his analysis
enthusiastically. It was the end of a long journey, for there is nothing in
his background or his history which could lead him there. His demand,
both imperious and touching, had left me puzzled: ‘I want an analysis
because I can’t speak,’ he had said to me, hammering away at his armchair. He no longer wanted to be violent. He had just become a father,
he had a little girl: ‘I want to be a real father.’ What I understood at the
time was: ‘and not beat her or seduce her’; nowadays I would add: ‘and
not feel like a little girl’.
He had himself been violently treated by a brutal and unfair father
whose inverted Oedipus complex at the homosexual level was revealed
to be fairly virulent. This same father knew how to be gentle with the
sisters, while they were little. He seduced the young women servants.
Coming from the fallen and impoverished lower aristocracy of Britanny,
the family led the life of deprived peasants, in a huge, dilapidated
residence. The mother, a foreigner by birth, was relegated to one wing
of the house with her children. She was pregnant, expecting Leonard,
when she got herself married. In the first years of his life, Leonard moved
around between the two wings. At the time of his adolescence, he was
definitively installed in the one occupied by his paternal grandmother, his
father and his young beautiful mistress, Aurélie, a former servant who
had been seduced by the father when she was fifteen. Unlike the others,
she had not left the house. She had made sure of her reign by taking in
hand what was left of the estate, and she helped to bring about an
unexpected material improvement. Leonard’s father also moved around
between the two wings. After Leonard he had had five daughters, and
also continued his short-lived affairs.
Leonard describes a childhood during which the quantities of
excitation to which he was subjected seem intolerable. He remembers a
CLINICAL NOTES ON THE IDENTIFICATION WITH THE LITTLE GIRL 269
passive, overwhelming mother, who would endlessly fuss over him, and a
stepmother too close to him in age who used to draw him into
ambiguous, exciting games, and an authoritarian grandmother. Stick in
hand, she got obedience from everyone. Leonard was a bad pupil. Beaten
and badly treated by a father who could not bear any closeness with his
son, or any investigative activity on his part, he attracted blows and
punishments from masters and teachers. Very early on he got into
running away. He became involved with gangs of ‘thugs’. Together they
made trouble, caused havoc, created panic at village dances and attacked
girls on their own.
The violence, which was going to make him so afraid later on, always
appears in situations of homosexual closeness. In the army, in a moment
of blind anger, he had broken everything in sight and beaten up an
officer. Instead of military service, he was made to do fifteen months in a
psychiatric hospital. He came out of it very depressed, equipped with a
‘prescription’ decreed by a smart colonel-doctor: ‘In civil life, you will
marry and then you will forget all about that.’
For a time this was true. Leonard had broken off with his family. He
came to Paris with no education and no money at all. He married the
first girl he came across in a bar. He knew that up till then she had lived
from prostitution, but he loved her none the less for that. He was very
happy for two years with his first wife. This was always the way he spoke
of her, without revealing her first name. One day, she disappeared. He
was never to see her again. From this point he was to go through a
number of years veiled in obscurity, which he does not much speak of.
He committed thefts, ‘jobs’. The day the others suggested an armed
robbery, he put a brutal stop to his delinquent activity. ‘You don’t come
back from that.’
I don’t want to go on too long about Leonard’s childhood, but we
must return briefly to the episode of the first wife, who was also to
reappear at times in the transference. The break-up of his marriage
condenses some complex elements. It seems that Leonard was able to live
through a period of tranquillity, protected by the presence of this woman
who was highly attractive, lively and not passive like his mother, very
much a woman and not adolescent like the Aurélie of his childhood. In
the course of analysis, there would be revealed the very specific point5 in
their relationship, where he could not stop himself identifying with her,
penetrated and prostituted. This movement was all the more unbearable
to the extent that it was obviously opaque to him. He became violent,
beat her several times to the point of sending her to hospital. He got
back into dubious friendships. He had the idea of putting his wife out on
the street so as to cease working for her. In short, he scared her enough
for her to run away without leaving any traces. Leonard experienced this
270 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
departure and his descent once more into delinquency as a repetition of
fate, a repetition which had come about solely from the relentlessness of
his feminine identification, against which he never ceases to struggle
(among men, he sees himself in danger of being a woman, and with a
women he tries to find a mode of investment emptied of any
identification. So he is seeking the impossible and is thus always sent back
to what he refuses).
At the time when he came to ask for analysis, he was living with a
woman, very different from the first one, authoritarian and determined: a
militant. The birth of his little girl was a challenge to this precarious
situation. He had to be a father, and in order to do this he sought a father
for himself beneath the exterior of a woman analyst. Against all
appearances, it was the stability of the superego, much more than his
remarkable insights,6 which convinced me of Leonard’s capacities for
benefiting from a classical analysis. He knew how to make a novel out of
his dreadful childhood, half Balzac, half Zola, and his text, more than his
history, guaranteed that his functioning was predominantly neurotic.
To make the account clear, I should say that during the six months
that preceded the first session, after the preliminary interviews, Leonard
bought a small wood. He went there on Sundays, and often in the
evenings after the session; he cleared space, cut down wood and chopped
it ardently. This wood linked to the analysis (a way of managing his
violence, his wood is also the place where he can be on his own) is the
subject, like it, of quarrels between him and his wife. What is more, two
years later he decided to acquire a professional qualification. He passed an
entrance examination and completed a long training period under
conditions which he considered very close to those of the army. He
derived considerable benefit from this and has just taken the examination
certifying the end of the training.
In the session following the exams—he had been absent while they
were going on—he talks about the completed training. He is sorry it has
ended, he had felt good ‘between men’. He remembers his military
service: at the time he had not been capable of profiting from it. The
theory orals that he had been afraid of have gone very well. He was sure
of himself and even calm. But the next day he almost ‘had an attack’.
The test consisted of creating a technical model, he was proud of it. The
examiner passes behind him and ‘fiddles with [tripote]’ his model. Leonard
is very upset, he wants to punch out. He restrains himself, but hears
himself shouting while he is replying to the questions. He shouts during
the session, getting angry with the examiner, with me, with himself. He
remembers the army, and also his childhood investigations around a
bicycle which he apparently ‘fiddled with’ to see how it worked. For this
he got a tremendous thrashing from his father. Why did this panic
CLINICAL NOTES ON THE IDENTIFICATION WITH THE LITTLE GIRL 271
overwhelm him one more time? What made him frightened [mouiller]?
[‘Mouiller in French means ‘to wet’. By extension and in slang it means
to be frightened. In the sexual vocabulary it means the feminine vaginal
lubrication. Hence the patient could be heard saying ‘I am excited like a
woman’—Editor’s note.] I simply stress this word. When he leaves me he
is in a fury.
The next day he had a dream: he was making love with a little girl.
The little girl is me, the analyst, he declares. He has already told me that I
am like his first wife’s little sister. He thinks of his father’s Don Juan
behaviour, of Aurélie, of his young sisters, and relates an old memory
that has been gone over numerous times. He saw himself masturbating in
a dress of his mother’s with red spots, then the scene changed: he was
slipping the dress on and masturbating in front of the mirror.
He is very pleased with this dream, he says, but still, when I link it
back to the material from the day before, he says it is unbearable:
‘everything is mixed up’.
Leaving this session, he does not go home; he takes himself to his
wood where he prunes some trees with his saw and falls asleep. He is
awoken by a nightmare: ‘two men have penetrated into his wood’. He
assures himself that it is a dream, but continues to be afraid. He imagines
he needs an alarm, then understands the absurdity of his idea because the
wood is isolated. He remains awake, realizing angrily that for the first
time in his life he is afraid of being alone in his wood at night.
The movement of these three sessions is linear. Confronted with
paternal seduction through the examiner who aroused him—fiddler—
Leonard in vain attempts an identificatory reversal of the sadism; but
faced with castration, of whose existence he wishes to be ignorant—even
though his castration anxiety is strong—he finishes with his feminine
identification in the heart of the Oedipus complex, which is the
identification with the little girl. In other words, he discovers in his
predicament the dual layering of castration. The classic problematic of
castration-feminine identification is all the more poignant for not
resulting in homosexuality, whether active or fantasized. His mother is
not an Oedipal rival. Having set off to affirm himself woodcutter-wolfrapist, poor Leonard finds himself forced to go and play at experiencing
in reality the feeling of Little Red Riding Hoods when they are alone in the woods.
The appearance of the identification with the little girl, an ambiguous
and overdetermined image, is always a fruitful but difficult moment
during men’s analyses, whether or not they are homosexual. Moreover,
the affective charge is so great that Leonard breaks an associative chain by
acting out:7 going into the woods in the evening. It is an acting out in
the analysis, taken back to the field of mentalization by way of a dream,
272 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
so very different from the classic regressive moments that were habitual
for him.
Leonard is the son of a Don Juan who, because of the ‘negation of
Oedipal failure’8 cannot take on the role of the father of a son. I discern
in my patient an early failure of homosexuality as something looking after
intellectual acquisitions (the bad pupil), at the same time as a noncompletion of resexualizing erotogenic masochism. His moments of
blind violence don’t seem to me to guarantee an identification with
paternal sadism. They signify an attempt at dramatic escape outside the
Oedipal conflict, less organized than homosexual activity would have
been. They go back to a homosexuality repressed below the point of
being figurable.
In spite of all these difficulties, Leonard requests an analysis because he
has been unable to recognize and differentiate the father’s gentle attitude
towards his little girls. How could he be gentle with the little girls who
are his rivals (in terms of siblings, he had five sisters)? And when he had
always been fighting the little girl in himself? So it is with this capacity of
his father’s that he wants to identify.9 He seeks to organize a basic gentle
tendency in himself, both to make possible homosexual or heterosexual
regressive movements, and in order to constitute sublimatory
movements. To do this, he sets up a paternal transference onto a woman
analyst, supported by a rigid and reassuring analytic framework. He seeks
an unexciting father completely removed from the father he had loved. I
would say that my being a woman was ‘a guarantee’, at the beginning of
his treatment, of both the continuity of transferential movements and the
narcissistic integrity of the analyst. If it is possible to be a man in the guise
of a woman, the opposite is eminently dangerous.
The detail of the first two sessions, highly condensed, is interesting:
Leonard says that he was able to feel alright in what Michael Fain has
called ‘the homosexual mass of brothers’. Moreover, he was able to be
calm when confronted with non-fiddling examiners (the theory orals; we
should remember that he also came to analysis to be able to speak).
When faced with the seduction on the part of the examiner-fiddler, he
risks becoming murderous and falls back on the feminine identification.
He understands my intervention as ‘You are a little girl’. The next day he
responds with the dream of a small girl where it is no longer clear who is
who. He declares that the little girl is me,10 the analyst. He is doubly
referred back to the paternal excitation.
Every time I represented the first wife in the transference, that brought
in the first wife’s little sister. Now it’s certainly that which drives him
crazy. If I am also a little girl, he no longer knows on whom to rely for
support, and everything gets mixed up. Therein, it seems to me, lies the
meaning of the screen-memory reworked in the transference.
CLINICAL NOTES ON THE IDENTIFICATION WITH THE LITTLE GIRL 273
First version: he is masturbating in his mother’s dress=receptacle.
Second version: he is masturbating disguised in his mother’s dress= he
identifies with his mother who is archaic, pre-Oedipal, not sexually
differentiated. In this situation he is defended against castration, but also
he confirms in the mirror that he is himself a man in the mother’s
clothing. Which enables him to rediscover the hidden indestructible
penis under a woman’s skirts.
Protected by the maternal imago, he can approach, and it isn’t simple,
his feminine identification at the heart of the Oedipus complex. Nothing
is yet decided.
But it is also here that all the ambiguity of the identification with the
little girl emerges. In the ‘Rat Man’ case history, Freud had stressed the
complexity of the appearance of a little girl (his own, indeed) in dreams.
The theme of the identification with the little sister had been treated at
length in the ‘Wolf Man’. In the Schreber case and ‘A seventeenthcentury demonological neurosis’, the question comes up of desires for
castration engendered in the man by his feminine desires.11 Yet the little
girl herself has nothing to lose; she is the most confirmed in her
narcissistic integrity. When Leonard goes into the depths of the woods in
the evening, it is to establish the little girl’s experience from the inside,
but he also perhaps knows that in fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hoods
come out again unharmed even when they have been eaten.
A stage or a turning-point in the hollow of the feminine identification,
the image of the little girl is still there. In the course of any analysis, in
the same way as with painting a picture, we have to rediscover the
‘mixed unity’ of little girl-venal woman- (the analyst or the patient, the
classic fantasy sometimes being the reversal into the opposite)12 mother.
Notes
Translated by Rachel Bowlby
1 Freud, ‘Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis’ (1909), in SE 10, pp. 155–249.
2 I would like to say here how much use I have made of Evelyne
Kestemberg’s two very fine seminars, ‘Homosexualité primaire’ and
‘Homosexualité masculine, homosexualité feminine’ (Centre de
Psychanalyse et de Psychothérapie, 1981 and 1981–2). But it is impossible
for me to mention them every time I am alluding to them, since they
provided me with the framework for this piece of work.
3 Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood’ (1910), in SE
11, p. 113.
4 In the sense that anything done, even when it has a direct link with the
fantasy on which it is based, may obliterate its meaning by a play of reversals.
5 She had asked him for sodomy, and taught him it.
6 ‘Insights’ is in English in the original—RB.
274 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
7 In English in the original—RB.
8 Cf. Michel Fain, ‘Réflexions à partir de certains aspects de la sexualité
masculine’, in Denise Braunschweig and Michel Fain, Eros et Anteros (Paris:
Payot, 1971). (I have referred below to the theory of the double and of the
role of siblings as the support of an early homosexuality.)
9 And not with the Don Juan figure, in whom he senses the inadequacies of
the superego.
10 Cf. children’s games during which they chant: ‘It’s the one who says it who
is it.’
11 See Freud, ‘Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis’ (note 1, above);
‘From the history of an infantile neurosis’ (1918), in SE 17, pp. 7–122;
‘Psychoanaltyic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia’
(Dementia Paranoides)’ (1911) in SE 12, pp. 9–79; ‘A seventeenth-century
demonological neurosis’ (1923) in SE 19, pp. 73–105.
12 Having put himself in a materially difficult situation, and after a highly
elaborate dream of castration, Leonard has momentarily (so he says) ended
his analysis. He would like to live ‘an artist’s life and not work for me any more’.
14
To the limits of male heterosexuality: the
vagina-man
ADAM LIMENTANI
The men I describe in this paper may go through life without
acknowledging any difficulty with their heterosexuality. They are
intelligent, gifted and usually untroubled by the variations of their sexual
drives, or the occasional fleeting interest in people of their own sex.
Their femininity, only faintly noticeable to others, is as a rule well
integrated and often put to good use in their professional lives. On the
debit side, although they are capable of fairly lasting and deeply satisfying
relationships with women, we find a high divorce rate and frequent
changes of partners. Some of them can be exceptionally promiscuous,
exploiting their capacity to attract women in a wholly effortless manner.
Their promiscuity has a striking oral quality, in so far as they give the
impression of being sexually insatiable, thus confirming the
psychoanalytic observation of the equation penis=mouth. Many of them
are little affected by an orgasmic incompetence which is hidden by a
reasonable sexual performance. All these men are incapable of a full
homosexual contact, though some have experimented with boys in
childhood or early adolescence, but never intensely.
Brief reference should be made to their partners, who are mostly said
to be strikingly beautiful, rather masculine, and intellectually powerful
women. Whilst this description fits into the popular or psychoanalytic
definition of the phallic woman, no notable features are reported about
the partners of the promiscuous males, except for a willingness to engage
in frequent, casual sexual intercourse.
Life stresses, physical illness and especially a breakdown in the
relationship with a partner, make these people aware of the areas of
darkness in their heterosexuality. Should they seek help, the added stress
of the therapeutic situation highlights anxieties about their femininity and
threatened homosexuality. Their early life invariably shows the presence
of some traumatic experiences, but the picture of early object relations
that emerges within the transference is in no way suggestive of true
homosexuality. There is, for instance, no evidence that the latent
275
276 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
homosexuality, if present, is being used as a defence against paranoid
anxieties; there is no suggestion of seductive behaviour on the part of
mother; there are no allegations of a very weak, or alternatively
terrifying, father figure. On the other hand, and this may seem a
contradiction, there is a great deal of evidence that mother was somewhat
masculine, if not a phallic type of woman, who also treated her child as a
phallus. My observations may also suggest that these mothers are
possessive but capable of temperamental withdrawals and sudden rejections.
In the course of psychoanalytic treatment, the extent of the
disturbance is brought to light, notably on account of a secret wish to be
a woman, associated with a profound envy of everything female. In some
instances the desire to be a woman is accompanied by an even more
jealously guarded secret of possessing a fantasy vagina, when not only the
anus and the mouth, but also the eye, the ear and the urethral orifice are
endowed with receptive qualities similar to those of the vagina. It should
be noted that in the majority of cases this fantasy has been subjected to
repression. In some cases this part-object identification is implicit but
well concealed by the whole-object identification.
If my notion of a vagina-man, the counterpart of the phallic woman,
proves acceptable, we shall have to consider the reasons for the fact that
the fantasy of having a vagina has not received the attention which it
deserves. I can only offer some tentative explanations. In the first instance
it is possible that the overwhelming orality displayed by these men in
their analyses, coupled with our enslavement to conventional and
generally accepted beliefs, has contributed to the neglect. On the other
hand, the refinement of psychoanalytic techniques with a better
understanding of the implications of protective and introjective
identification has contributed to the clarification of the symptomology
described in this paper.
Furthermore, the greater freedom enjoyed by men and women in
expressing their desire to cross the boundaries of sexual genders, has
encouraged the bringing into consciousness of fantasies which were until
now subjected to denial, suppression and repression. The lesson to be
learnt from the studies of transsexualism has not yet been absorbed by
psychoanalysts. Is it not to be expected that many men could prefer to
indulge in perverse fantasies of belonging to the other sex, avoiding fear
of castration, and worst of all, the mutilation of their bodies?
Clinical illustrations
(1) Alan was thirty years old when he began a psychoanalysis on account
of difficulty in sustaining relationships with women and work inhibitions.
His heterosexuality was not questioned until the third year of analysis
TO THE LIMITS OF MALE HETEROSEXUALITY 277
when it became apparent that his sexual experiences, though they could
not be criticized in any way, were not accompanied by much satisfaction.
It turned out that during intercourse his almost exclusive interest was
focused on what the partner felt. The fact that he had no male friends
and that in the transference he experienced ill-concealed anxiety towards
the analyst as a man, naturally led to a careful investigation of latent
homosexuality. This lack of male friends seemed to make little or no
difference to his capacity to be in male company. Alan was in every way
a male in physical appearance and deportment; yet he felt that his
feminity was immediately noticeable to anyone who met him. That his
girl friends did not share his view was of no reassurance to him. There
had been, in fact, a succession of affairs, lasting long spells, with allegedly
very beautiful women who without exception were remarkably
intelligent, masculine and career-orientated. None of them had any
interest in having children, which suited him well.
Alan’s passivity and pervasive orality had been carefully and relentlessly
analysed. Again there had been little change but, in view of many other
improvements, as we reached the ninth year of the analysis, we decided
to give ourselves one year’s notice of termination. Alan was now under
severe pressure and not only because he feared that he might be incapable
of mourning me, just as at one time he had not been able to cope with
his mother’s death. He was worried because, having lived with a girl for
three years, he had to decide whether he should marry her. He had no
wish to interfere with her career, but he thought they should have a
family. He feared ending up staying at home looking after the baby and
hated the prospect of giving up his work. There were also other
problems, as his professional success had brought him more responsibility,
which he felt he should accept as a real man, but he still felt unequal to
the task. His rapidly increasing passivity was reflected in the analysis,
when he would lie motionless on the couch with his legs wide apart,
demanding to be given interpretations whilst attempting to get inside my
mind by urging me to express opinions on all sorts of problems. Alan
bitterly complained that as a result of the analysis he was in the
unpleasant position of having to give all the time, when all he wanted to
do was to be at the receiving end. This material was at first understood in
the light of the impending separation, still a long way off, but the
situation remained unchanged. On the other hand, the emphasis began to
shift towards a renewed intensity of his anxieties about his femininity. I
made some very incomplete notes at the time, concentrating on what
was relevant for me to some work I was doing on transsexuals.
Alan announced at the start of the session that he had some big things
to talk about but promptly took up other matters in an attempt to divert
attention from himself. I allowed him to get back on course, on his own,
278 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
as in the counter-transference I was getting a feeling that I was being
forced into a role of a powerful, controlling female, the dominating
figure in his infancy and love life. He then said he had seen Shaw’s Man
and Superman and had been deeply impressed because the woman in the
play knew how to choose her man, someone who was charming, talked
easily and freely to people. True, the man was feminine, but he handled
his femininity very well. He wished he could be like that. I commented
that as usual he was trying to deal with his problem by referring to
someone else, as if we had not become sufficiently familiar with his
anxiety. I ended up with a clumsy remark that for him to be feminine
meant to be homosexual and that was the issue he wanted to avoid with
me. As usual Alan readily agreed, but this time he did not proceed to
attack and destroy what I had given him, as he was clearly preoccupied
with other thoughts. As he got immersed into explaining his views on
feminine women, it occurred to me that he was equating femininity with
passivity, a common enough notion, and not with homosexuality. Alan
received this modest enlightenment with a furious outburst, complaining
that I had never given him such an important explanation before. At the
time it did not occur to either of us that none of his women friends had
been in the least passive, either in their personal lives or sexually. His
current partner, however, had caused him considerable alarm because she
was forcing him into a more active position by never taking the initiative
about sexual matters.
This session seemed to give Alan a sense of freedom about talking of
his desire to be a woman and some time later he said: ‘I feel I have been
a vacuum cleaner…that is my idea of having a huge, bottomless vagina.
But I want to know, where is everything I have taken in. When I watch
my girl friend and you [the analyst], it looks as if you have everything in
your minds…it grows and grows….’ Alan was at long last getting
affectively in touch with his envy of the genital woman, mother who had
the paternal phallus and all the babies.
There is nothing particularly unusual about this material, which was
meant to show how ten years had gone by before the patient felt he
could talk about his fantasy of having a vagina. It was not clear to me
how long the fantasy had been conscious and I have no recollection of it
having appeared in any dream, although the patient dreamt profusely. I
should point out that the fantasy occupied a great deal of space in the
analysis but for not more than a few sessions. After that it seemed if it was
of no particular importance, and for that reason I failed to make any
further notes. Several months later, however, I made a note, commenting
on how ‘There are times when I lose contact with Alan, usually after a
good interpretation. He seems to become absorbed by his own thoughts,
due to his desire to discover how I have reached a certain conclusion. It
TO THE LIMITS OF MALE HETEROSEXUALITY 279
strikes me as if he is reliving his relationship with women.’ It was indeed
through the comprehension and the accurate analysis of the projective
and introjective identifications, in the transference, that the true nature of
the patient’s relationships was revealed and understood. From the
beginning of the analysis Alan wished to impress me with his associations,
dreams, and his behaviour in the session, and in due course with his
capacity to give himself some interpretations. He often readily admitted
that he wished to be as exciting as possible ‘for the good of the work that
we are doing’, he would say. On such occasions a good response from
me was felt by him to be similar to a woman’s orgasm. This kind of
experience would make him feel well satisfied with his session. In the countertransference I often felt that the patient wished to force me into a
feminine and passive position, making me hope that I would receive
something from him that would get us out of a stagnating situation.
Whilst he was able to get rid of some of his passivity in the manner I
have just described, he was less successful about his femininity. Apart
from all this, the patient at times impressed me as behaving as something
like an analytic phallus, thus reliving his very special relationship with his
mother.
Alan and his mother had, in fact, been very attached to one another, in
the first two years of his life, but he had felt rejected when she had a
second child. Through the transference, it had been possible to
reconstruct that his mother had treated him as her phallus.
This patient falls within my notion of the vagina-man, the male who
relies on his heterosexual inclinations, supported by an identification with
the woman (the primal object) in order to escape from threats of
homosexuality. Alan was a charming man who, according to his own
admission when he was a little more honest and spontaneous, could be
very popular with both men and women, yet I doubt he would ever
succeed in being really friendly with a man. His need to equate
femininity with passivity was absolutely essential as part of a defensive
manoeuvre against homosexuality. This defence was also very effective in
containing his castration anxiety, which was little in evidence in his
analysis. I believe this was the reason for the conscious appearance of the
fantasy of his identification with the partial object (the maternal vagina),
at a time when he felt very exposed within the transference and his life
situations. I have already alluded to and have tried to show in this brief
account of the analysis of this patient, how an excessive preoccupation
with homosexuality and the pressure to interpret it within the
transference, can lead us astray. In the case of my patient, I was quite
certain that his psychopathology was not typical of a homosexual. I shall
add that there was nothing whatever that had occurred to him during the
first years of his life, to make me even remotely consider the possibility
280 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
that I was dealing with a person who was close to the pathology of
transsexualism.
(2) John was a highly intelligent young man, an intellectual with a
remarkable capacity for absorbing knowledge. He was curious and
inquisitive about things and people and was most sensitive to changes and
sounds. In his childhood he had undergone abdominal surgery and it
seemed fair to assume that this had mobilized severe castration fears. Yet
his sexual development had, in general, been normal and since
adolescence he had enjoyed a very active sexual life. His home
background was regarded as having been good, but from the beginning
of the analysis it was clear that he had been the object of much
ambivalent attention on the part of his mother.
Questioning thoughts about his heterosexuality had appeared early in
the analysis. The following sessions are meant to show how the patient
had been fighting a defensive battle against castration fears and threats
from a powerful mother, from whom he had difficulty in separating. The
unknown quantity of a gentle but firm father added to his problems.
Session 1: The patient dreams of being with a woman who has the face
of a girl (sic) with lots of freckles. She was delightful and acted very
sexually, rubbing her body against his. He could feel her wetness. He
associated the woman in the dream with a girl with whom he had had a
similar experience. Recalling that the only flaw in his sexual
development was a complete absence of nocturnal pollutions, I began an
interpretation on these lines, but the patient interrupted me, saying: ‘You
are curious about that, aren’t you? All that is in your mind, not mine.’ I
said he was quite satisfied that it should be the woman who was wet and
not himself, and it seemed as if he wished me to go on being as confused
as he was about it.
Session 2: Next day John expressed disappointment that I had failed to
show my appreciation for his self-control, to the point of stopping
himself from having an orgasm. He claimed he could do the same with
all his partners, waiting for a signal from them.
Session 3: A few days later, after being silent for a while, John said, ‘I
had a dream once, when I was in therapy. I had a vagina and I was giving
birth to a baby. The baby spoke with a very cultured accent and started
telling me some riddles that I could not solve.’ In his associations, the
patient remembered that he had the dream at a time when he was very
involved with a male friend at university. They probably were very
much in love with each other and he could not understand why they had
not had an affair. As he hesitated, I took the opportunity of drawing his
attention to the fact that at the time he seemed to have a fantasy of being
a woman and having a baby. Perhaps he could not easily think of having
sex with a man. John responded: ‘Funny you should say that, as I
TO THE LIMITS OF MALE HETEROSEXUALITY 281
remember standing in front of a mirror at the time, thinking, “Look at
that body, I could make love to it.”’ He suddenly felt embarrassed and
fell silent. I interpreted that it was not clear to me whether the image in
the dream wished to make love to him, or the other way around, not
that it mattered much but I also thought he felt there was something of
that nature developing between us.
I should note here that the incident reported in this session is the only
occasion when the patient had felt close to becoming involved in a
homosexual act.
Session 4: Next day the patient started by praising the analysis because
he felt free to be what he wanted on the couch. ‘If I want to be a
woman, so be it, it does not matter’, he said. A dream of the previous
night came to his mind. He was in a garden. In a corner there was a
birds’ bath with lots of penises in it. He tells himself he does not want them.
Session 5: The session began with the report of a dream which the
patient had shortly after hearing a radio broadcast about a British ship
being turned away from a port because it was carrying nuclear weapons.
‘I was on a beach’, he said, ‘and there was a pretty pussy cat, jumping
about. It was loaded with nuclear bombs or a microchip. It could have
gone off any moment. There was a most beautiful, small object that
could be made to fly; it was made of silver. Later, it was put inside a
phantom jet.’ He associated the silver object with a nickname his mother
had for him. ‘Pretty phallic, don’t you think?’ He now reminded me that
in the past we had discovered how a cat stood for his femininity which
got out of control now and again. He then started laughing, saying: ‘I
had not thought of it until now but can’t you see that the phantom jet is
my phantom vagina, with that small, beautiful silver thing shooting out
of it
The sessions reported were important for several reasons. They
provided some direct evidence that the patient’s mother had treated him
as her phallus in his early life (see the association to the small object in
session 5). In the counter-transference I had often felt that some of his
heterosexual exploits were intended to fill me with admiration and
vicarious satisfaction. The father was constantly being kept out of the
picture, but he seemed to return now and again under the guise of the
phallus hidden in mother’s body. The threat from the paternal phallus
and all the anxieties related to it are met with a revival of an
identification with the whole or the part object (the vagina).
The patient’s attitude was summed up some months later when, quite
spontaneously, he said that the only way he found really safe and
satisfactory to deal with powerful masculine women, was to ‘feel like a
woman, or better still, to become like a woman’. Nothing else would do
with them, or indeed with the analyst, who would admirably fit into the
282 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
image of a combined male and female figure. Hence his need to impress
me with his pleasure in being a woman on the couch, if he so wished
(see end of session 4).
Several months later, I had the opportunity of showing to the patient
that he wished me to know that he was still seeking phallic women as a
good match for his fantasy vagina. The patient replied, pointing out that
he could not follow what I was saying. Had I confused him with
someone else, he asked. After a silence, he began vaguely to remember
mentioning such a fantasy ages ago, but he still could not remember what
made me say that so firmly. I then found it necesssary to remind him of
his dream about the phantom jet, etc., and this was followed by
immediate recognition, making it unnecessary for me to give further details.
It would seem, therefore, that the fantasy I am describing in this paper
is liable to be suppressed or disavowed, or even re-repressed, but that it
can reappear into consciousness equally suddenly.
(3) Francis was a middle-aged man who had spent the last twenty years
of his life chasing a great many women, very successfully. On entering
analysis his problem was one of vacillation, in so far as he never had less
than a masculine and feminine woman to choose a partner from. This
had enabled him to remain a bachelor, indulging his sado-masochistic
tendencies at the same time. In the analysis he was soon to discover that
his psychic femininity was not only his secret, but also a stumbling block
to his capacity to relate to men and women. His unhappy home life as a
child was still haunting him. His father, who had publicly admitted to
having been a homosexual until his marriage, treated his mother
abominably. Francis was convinced that his father expected him, and
indeed wanted him, to be a homosexual, but he hated the idea.
Throughout his adolescence he was troubled by his attraction for boys of
his own age and still experienced embarrassing feelings with some men.
It was not long before a strong resistance developed in the analysis, easily
traced to a florid homosexual transference. Nevertheless, this was helpful
in recapturing some early screen memories. For instance, as a child of
three, the patient often played a game which consisted of putting father’s
penis to his ear pretending it was a telephone. He also remembered how
rubbing his back against that of his mother would be ‘extraordinarily
soothing’, especially if he had been frightened (no detail of the source of
the fear was given). This is the history that is often given by practising
homosexuals, but Francis was able to avoid this outcome by allowing free
rein to his fantasy of being a man, besides acting it out in his relationships
with his partners, through projective and introjective identification. In
the transference the soothing interpretations were highly sexualized
experiences when the analyst’s voice would reach him through his ear
TO THE LIMITS OF MALE HETEROSEXUALITY 283
(which he often equated with the female genital), whereas the more
unpleasant interpretations were experienced as unwelcome anal attacks.
(4) This clinical illustration will demonstrate how the vagina-man can
at times reach the very extreme limit of heterosexuality, bringing him
dangerously close to homosexuality. In these instances, the desire to be a
woman is not associated with a fantasy of having a vagina, but is more
directly experienced as a conscious, passive desire for penetration by
another man. It is perhaps the threat of castration anxiety coming from
members of both sexes that leads them away from fulfilling the desire.
Oscar had become impotent with his wife and other women,
following a surgical operation on the genital-urinary system. This had
occurred during a long analysis which had been stagnating for some time,
owing to the patient’s sexualization of the relationship with the analyst,
which was experienced as reciprocal sodomization. He frequently
achieved orgasm without an erection, simply by stimulating his anus. He
would succeed in having an erection if his wife inserted a finger in his
anus, but still could not achieve penetration. He regarded his wife, a careerorientated woman, as being ‘absolutely phallic’, not at all interested in
having children, which did not displease him. Oscar was a charming, middleaged man. He was brilliant, sensitive, and professionally successful, but
plagued by guilt which prevented him from enjoying his achievements.
He read voraciously and absorbed all in his environment with his mind
and eyes that missed little. He had managed to keep his masculine
aggressiveness under control by exploiting his femininity to the point of
making himself utterly passive and dominated by large numbers of
people. His early object relations were disastrous. The father was an
effeminate, ineffectual man, intellectually brilliant and highly respected
within his own professional circle. He represented the maternal side of
the parental couple, whilst mother was the decision-maker and the active
partner. Oscar was deeply confused, as he always had been from the age
of five when an older boy had handled his penis, to show him what sex
was like. In late adolescence he got involved in some work with a
homosexual and he recalls how fascinated he was by the stories this man
recounted of his sexual encounters with large numbers of men. The
operation had left him a feeling of having had a bad pregnancy, and as he
said this, he would feel his abdomen. The insertion of a catheter was just
what he had imagined it would be like to be penetrated anally.
I have described in some detail this man’s desires and fears about
homosexuality, as it seemed in direct contrast with his earlier life which
had been one of remarkably active heterosexual pursuits. As he was only
seen in consultation, it was not possible to have a clear picture of his
early sexual development, although he insisted that in spite of his sexual
confusion, he had never experienced any particular difficulties, certainly
284 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
nothing like what had happened to him since the operation had deeply
affected him.
Discussion
The men described in the clinical illustrations share a sufficient number
of qualities and characteristics to allow me to put forward the hypothesis
of a vagina-man who is, to some extent, to be considered the counterpart
of the classical concept of the phallic woman. It is well known that the
latter is mainly a pre-Oedipal fantasy, that the woman (mother) is
endowed with a phallus (external or internal). In later life, it is met in
men who feel masochistic and submissive towards women. There is,
however, also the woman who considers herself, or is considered by
others, to be endowed with phallic attributes, consciously or
unconsciously. In my view an analogous situation occurs in those men
who consider themselves to be endowed with very strong feminine
attributes, a belief which can at times be shared by others. But that is
where the analogy with the phallic woman ends, in so far as in this latter
case we are dealing with a much more primitive kind of fantasy.
The vagina-man is basically narcissistic, intelligent, charming and
friendly. He is easily affected by contacts with people, when he becomes
engulfing or engulfed. Some of his character traits could be regarded as
oral: he reads voraciously; he looks at things with unfailing avidity; he
insatiably seeks the company of others especially that of women, in or
outside a sexual context. He is feminine, but his femininity is almost
entirely psychic; yet he is vulnerable in so far as he fears it is noticeable to
others. Only occasionally do women remark on his femininity. The vaginaman is attentive to women and as a result of it, his sexual performance is
in general better than average, but his own pleasure is somewhat
diminished by the envy of what the partner is experiencing, coupled
with a desire to know exactly what that experience is.
His partner is usually a masculine woman, who has a distinct
preference for the more feminine male. It is interesting that both John
and Francis had championed the cause of feminism to the delight of their
lady friends.
An outstanding feature of the personality of the vagina-man is his
passivity. This is in no way a problem in relation to the more phallic type
of woman because of the opportunity to be feminine without having to
compete whilst offering himself as the presumably desired phallus. On
the other hand, the passivity is an unwelcome character trait when
relating to men, especially those in authority. The anxiety is mainly one
of being controlled rather than of homosexual submission. At one time
Alan was less afraid of ending up as a homosexual than of being
TO THE LIMITS OF MALE HETEROSEXUALITY 285
controlled by men in his professional life; on the whole, he would always
feel reassured by his heterosexuality.
As I have already indicated throughout this paper, I believe that
projective and introjective identifications play a dominant role in
negotiating all that is needed in establishing and maintaining the
counterphobic measures so necessary to the vagina-man’s survivial. In
some instances it will be the control or anxiety which is defended against
as it implies a disintegration and loss of identity. On the other hand many
other cases will show the main source of anxiety to be the inability to
give up the primal object. I should stress that the analysis of men with
this symptomatology, without exception, reveals the presence of at times
severe narcissistic disturbance. They cannot, however, be regarded as
suffering from narcissistic personality disorders, at least as I understand
Kohut’s definition of this nosological category. Neither do they come
close to Joyce McDougall’s description of ‘some narcissistic perturbation,
which results from perpetual oscillation between the two poles of
libidinal investment, the constant swing from narcissistic libido to object
libido’. The patients described by this writer have a ‘sexuality which is
secretive and obscure, or marked by indifference’ (McDougall 1982:381).
The reader could well be wondering whether the individuals I have
described should be regarded as bisexual. The fact that all human beings
have a number of psychic characteristics belonging to both sexes
continues to receive attention from psychoanalysts and the general
public. More often than not this generalization leads to preconceived
ideas about the social roles of males and females, thus tending to confuse
the issue. Any behaviour which is passive, intuitive, submissive or
masochistic is feminine, whilst active, sadistic, intellectual and penetrative
behaviour is typical of masculine attributes. These attributes, however,
also vary from one society to another. In any case, the concept of
bisexuality is something that Freud may well have come to regret after he
introduced it at the instigation of his friend Fliess, as he never seems to
be quite at home with it. This could have been due to the incomplete
state of knowledge of embryology, biology and physiology at the time he
was writing the Three Essays. In a footnote to the differentiation between
men and women, he states ‘in human beings pure masculinity or
femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or a biological
sense’ (Freud 1905a: p. 220). But in 1930 he writes:
The theory of bisexuality is still surrounded by many obscurities and
we cannot but feel it is as a serious impediment in psychoanalysis that
it has not yet found any link with the theory of the instinct. However
this may be, if we assume it as a fact that each individual seeks to
satisfy both male and female wishes in his sexual life, we are prepared
286 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
for the possibility that those [two sets of] demands are not fulfilled by
the same object.
(Freud 1930:106)
The notion of the vagina-man shows that some individuals are capable of
satisfying their needs in one object, and in some ways it lends support to
the somewhat unsatisfactory concept of bisexuality which, given its
prevalence in psychoanalytic thinking, would seem to be almost
indispensable.
In my view, our understanding of bisexuality can be improved by the
adoption of a concept which covers a constellation of symptoms,
behaviour patterns and personality traits to be found in men who manage
to exist at the limits of heterosexuality. My conclusions are based on
observations of a very large number of individuals I have met in
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy during the past thirty years that could
not be included as clinical illustrations. The fantasy of having a vagina is
not wholly necessary to the hypothesis and in any case, even if it is part
of their psychic life, it may never come into consciousness. I am in no
way advocating the neglect of analysing latent homosexuality or
homosexual impulses as they may appear in the transference relationship.
I nevertheless hope that the acceptance of this concept could lead us to
review some of our stereotyped ideas about homosexuality, or of many
cases of promiscuity. Its acceptance also means that we do not need to
take a romantic view of Don Juan as someone who was hoping to find
the ideal woman (the primal object), to the last; neither do we need to
accuse him of being a latent homosexual. Perhaps Don Juan is nothing
more than a man who has found a way of avoiding the outbreak of some
primitive anxiety which threatens to destroy him, by turning to the
pursuit of a chimera.
Note
This paper was first published in 1984 in the Journal of Analytic
Psychotherapy and Psychopathology 2:115–29.
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292 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
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294 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
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296 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
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Name index
Abelin, E.L. 30, 55, 58, 206
Aeschylus 121
Aisenstein, M. 267
Alan (case study) 276, 284
Alexander, F. 32
Andreas-Salomé, L. 187
Artaud, A. 147
Bachofen, J.J. 121, 123
Balint, E. 8
Barnett, M.C. 103, 192
Bassin, D. 188
Begoin-Guignard, F. 172
Benedek, T. 12, 22, 188
Benedicte (case study) 237, 241, 243
Benjamin, H. 260
Benvenuto, B. 18
Bergler, E. 35
Bernstein, D. 187, 188, 191
Bernstein, I. 187
Bettelheim, B. 25, 260
Bibring, G. 22, 61, 188
Bion, W.R. 86, 87, 236
Blanck, G. 44
Blanck de Cereijido, F. 46
Blos, P. 46, 48, 49
Blum, H.P. 8, 13, 14
Boehm, F. 25
Bonaparte, M. 5, 6
Braunschweig, D. 22, 37, 103, 104,
123, 132, 180n
Breen, D. 22, 188
Brenman Pick, I. 31
Brierley, M. 6, 187
Britton, R. 30, 46, 48, 83
Brooks, G. 207
Burgner, M. 8, 46
Candy (case study) 196
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. 8, 9, 14, 30,
68, 103, 107, 147, 168, 176, 199,
207, 208, 215
Chehrazi, S. 188
Chodorow, N. 7
Clower, V.L. 191
Cosnier, J. 104, 168 passim
Coxon, A. 219
David, C. 32, 34, 35, 39n, 178
de Mijolla, A. 18
de Saussure, F. 9, 10
Debby (case study) 198
Denis, P. 35, 46
Deutsch, H. 5, 6, 71, 156, 187, 187
Diatkine, R. 17, 142
Dinnerstein, D. 7
Dolto, F. 22, 155, 187
Dora (case study) 49
Duparc, F. 32, 103, 187
Duras, M. 157
Edgcumbe, R. 8, 46
Ehrhardt, A. 191
Eissler, K. 175, 182n
Erikson, E. 16, 188, 191
Fain, M. 22, 37, 103, 104, 123, 132,
180n, 271
299
300 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Fellini, F. 156
Fenichel, O. 262
Flaubert, G. 243
Formanek, R. 46
Fraiberg, S. 193
Francis (case study) 281, 283
Frejaville, A. 35
Freud, A. 264
Freud, S. 1, 1, 17, 22, 28, 36, 60, 68,
72, 74, 76, 77, 91, 147, 157, 161,
168, 171, 174, 176, 191, 219, 260,
262, 267, 272;
on activity-passivity polarity 173;
theory of anal sexual intercourse 114;
on bisexuality 4, 34, 234, 284;
on castration complex 1, 26, 74;
clitoral-vaginal transfer theory 127;
on female superego 187;
notion of feminine masochism 2, 5;
and Oedipus complex 3, 43, 43,
49, 49, 50, 59, 83, 83;
on penis envy 2, 13;
on pre-Oedipal phase 23, 70;
on sexual aberrations 215;
theory of sexual phallic monism
99, 107 passim, 168
Gaddini, E. 222
Galenson, E. 14, 30, 46, 192, 195,
196, 199, 236, 242, 248
Gantheret, F. 37
Gibeault, A. 103, 104, 168
Gillespie, W.H. 7, 12, 37, 103, 116,
127, 215
Gilligan, C. 209
Gitelson, M. 46
Glasser, M. 30, 189, 215
Glover, L. 208, 215
Granoff, W. 155
Green, A. 17, 18, 38
Greenacre, P. 16, 28, 50, 262, 263
Greenson, R.R. 28, 260
Groddeck, G.W. 25
Grossman, W. 14, 206
Grunberger, B. 8, 9, 13, 118, 149
Gutton, P. 103
Heimann, P. 31, 72
Herzog, J.M. 55, 58
Horney, K. 23, 25, 32, 69, 99, 191
Inhelder, B. 64
Irigaray, L. 19, 20
Jacobson, E. 25, 177, 199, 262, 263
John (case study) 279, 283
Johnson, V. 8, 11, 13, 16, 127, 128, 141
Jones, E. 23, 69, 73, 99, 101, 116,
147, 148, 149, 158, 175
Keiser, S. 192, 203
Kennedy, R. 18
Kestemberg, E. 35, 176, 177
Kestenberg, J.S. 12, 22, 102, 187, 191,
192, 193, 199
Khan, M.M.R. 215
Kleeman, J. 15, 193, 203
Klein, M. 7, 14, 23, 25, 29, 39n, 69,
72, 73, 87, 88, 99, 103, 104, 142,
143, 261;
on castration complex 18, 26;
on femininity phase 25;
on maternal instinct 137, 144;
on Oedipus situation 32, 83, 100,
187;
on penis envy 22
Klossowski, P. 158
La Perriere, K. 260, 260
Lacan, J. 7, 9, 16, 18, 19, 22, 30, 31,
38n, 156, 161
Lampl-de Groot, J. 5, 8, 25, 29, 38n,
44, 71, 187
Lance (case study) 261, 264
Laplanche, J. 18, 34, 38n, 178
Laufer, M. 68
Laufer, M.E. 8, 46, 48, 68
Le Guen, A. 46
Leonard (case study) 267
Lerner, H.E. 195, 210
NAME INDEX 301
Lewin, B. 136
Lewis, M. 207
Lichtenstein, H. 46, 221
Limentani, A. 30, 32, 35, 215, 226,
227, 275
Little Hans case 108, 119, 174, 175, 176
Loewald, H.W. 30, 55
Luquet-Parat, C. 8, 148
McDougall, J. 8, 35, 119, 136, 215,
236, 284
Mack Brunswick, R. 5, 25, 39n, 60,
102
Mahler, M. 18, 30, 55, 56, 195, 260,
260, 263
Mary (case study) 78
Masters, W. 8, 11, 13, 16, 127, 128, 141
Mead, M. 261
Meltzer, D. 34, 35
Mendell, D. 208
Mijolla, A.de 18
Miller, J.B. 7
Mischell, W. 15
Mitchell, J. 6, 8, 32, 102
Mohaczy, I. 206
Money, J. 15, 191
Montgrain, N. 192, 193
Montrelay, M. 19, 22, 103, 104
Mueller, J. 191, 192
Muller, J. 99
Nunberg, H. 61
Ogden, T.H. 46
Oliner, M. 187
Oscar (case study) 282
O’Shaughnessy, E. 31
Panel, 55, 58
Parens, H. 14, 196
Parker, A. 20
Pauly, I. 260
Payne, S. 25, 28
Perrier, F. 155
Person, E.S. 32
Pfeiffer, E. 6
Piaget, J. 64
Pines, D. 22, 188
Pontalis, J-B. 17, 18, 38n
Rangell, L. 32
‘Rat Man’ case 267, 272
Reich, A. 203
Rey, J.M. 84
Riviere, J. 101, 156
Roiphe, H. 14, 30, 46, 192, 195, 196,
199, 236, 242, 248
Rose, J. 6, 8, 11
Rosen, I. 215
Ross, J.M. 55, 58
Rustin, M. 18
Sachs, H. 6, 187
Safouan, M. 13, 20
Saussure, F.de 9, 10
Sayers, J. 39n
Schneider, M. 32
Segal, H. 46, 246
Sherfey, M.J. 8, 12, 128
Silverman, M.A. 195, 204
Sophocles 152
Spiegel, L. 263
Starcke, A. 32
Stein, C. 29, 103
Steiner, J. 93
Stewart, W.A. 14, 206
Stoller, R.J. 15, 28, 32, 171, 180n,
191, 192, 195, 215, 242, 260, 263
Sullivan, S. 35
,
Torok, M. 8, 103, 138, 143, 148, 159
177
Turkle, S. 9
Tyson, P. 30, 32, 46, 103
Van der Leeuw, P.J. 25
302 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
Van Ophuijsen, H.W. 4
Weil-Halpem, F. 35
Wilkinson, S.M. 188
Winnicott, D. 34, 225, 249
Wolf Man case 114, 115
Subject index
abandonment anxiety 222
access anxiety 193, 194
activity-passivity polarity 25, 168, 172,
173, 174, 179
adolescence, male 51
adult ego ideal 61, 63
‘after revision’ 18
aggression 219
ambisexuality 34, 170
anal ego ideal 135
anal eroticism 142, 187
anal phase 195
anal primacy 31
anal sadism 187
anal sexual intercourse 114
anal-genital confusion 203
anality 134, 187, 187
anatomical destiny 2, 20, 176, 177
anatomy and female ego-functions 188
annihilatory anxiety 219, 222
anorexia 156
anxiety/anxieties 149;
core complex 222;
see also castration anxiety;
genital anxieties
après coup 18
auto-eroticism 134, 137, 171, 172, 177
babies:
‘transgression beyond sex’ of 140
baby wish 102;
see also maternal instinct
biology:
and femininity 3;
and sexuality 37
bisexuality 32, 36, 107, 170, 173, 234;
biological 234;
Freudian notion of 4, 34, 234;
psychological 234
castration:
feminine 158;
representation of 150
castration anxiety 26, 31, 32, 32, 43,
43, 100, 103, 105n, 150, 176, 178,
191, 223, 226, 227
castration complex 1, 14, 18, 20, 28,
31, 71, 103, 104, 114, 174
castration threat 139, 142
castration wish 75
clitoral excitation 12, 107, 127, 130
clitoral orgasm 11, 130, 182n
clitoral-vaginal transfer theory 11, 127
clitoris 16, 116, 141, 142;
and pre-Oedipal sexuality 13
concentricity of feminine sexuality
148, 149
conscious representation of castration
150
‘container and contained’ 86
core complex 219, 226
core gender identity 15, 51, 170,
180n, 236, 236, 257
creativity and the integration of
bisexual wishes 243
daughter-father relationship 69, 77,
115, 133, 207, 210
303
304 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
daughter-mother relationship 4, 20,
71, 72, 73, 74, 203
Day of Wrath (film) 157
‘deferred action’ 18
depression, post-natal 74
depressive position 46, 83
desire 152
deutero-phallic phase 101
diachronic versus synchronic
perspectives 16
diffusivity anxiety 193
direct observation 17
dis-identification from mother, male
260
dyadic father-son relationship 51, 54,
56, 57, 64, 65
early femininity 16, 46, 99
early genital phase 30
early Oedipal phase see pre-Oedipal
phase
ego-functions, female 188
ego ideal 61, 63;
anal 135
ego psychology 14
envy:
males of females 29, 260;
see also penis envy;
vagina envy
eroticism 144;
anal 142, 187;
auto-134, 137, 171, 172, 177
essentialism 19
Eumenides (Aeschylus) 122
externalization 199
false self personality 225
father identification with 29, 221, 226,
260, 260, 263;
loss of 241
father hunger 58, 60
father-child relationship 206
father-daughter relationship 69, 77,
115, 133, 207, 210
father-son relationship 25, 29, 49
female essence, notion of 19
female sexuality/femininity 1, 1, 36,
43, 68, 127, 147, 191;
biology and 3;
concentricity of 148, 149;
early 16, 46;
Freudian theory of 1, 1, 68, 107;
Lacanian theory of 9;
primary 15, 46
feminine identification 170, 267
feminine phase in boys 23, 25
femininity complex 25
feminism 7
fetishism 142, 143, 260
frigidity 73, 116, 158
gender identity 14, 28, 191, 194, 242,
260, 260, 261, 262, 263;
core 15, 51, 170, 180n, 236, 236,
257
genital anxieties, female 191
genital difference, recognition of 1,
192, 195, 195
genital logic 177
genital-anal confusion 203
good maternal object 86, 87
guilt, incorporation 9
helplessness 117
hero worship 61
heterosexuality, male 275
homosexuality 35, 53, 120, 215, 236;
female 123, 136;
primary 172, 176, 180n
identification:
with father 221, 226, 260, 260, 263;
feminine 170, 267;
with mother 168, 234, 260, 262;
primary 168;
see also dis-identification
imitation 222, 225
impotence, sexual 132
incest, prohibition of 28, 31, 43
incorporation-guilt 9
SUBJECT INDEX 305
individuation see separationindividuation struggle
infantile ego ideal 61
inner space, experiences of 188
inner-genital phase 22
instinctive sexual knowledge 113
internalization 221, 226
jouissance 150, 151, 155, 158, 171;
supplementary 19
Juliette of the Spirits 156
lack and female sexuality 116, 168
libidinal economy 132
libido 147
linguistics, structural 9
male sexuality/masculinity 1, 1, 22,
49, 215, 260, 267, 275
masculine women 144
masculinity complex 2, 74, 76
masochism 220;
feminine 2, 5, 8, 9, 43, 75, 155,
156, 171;
primary 171, 172
masturbation:
female 72, 76, 99, 176;
infantile 138
maternal goodness 86, 87
maternal instinct 137, 144
maternity, potential for 187
matriarchal-patriarchal transition 121,
123
maturation, biological 169
metaphor and sublimation 159
Midrash 107
mother:
identification with 168, 234, 260,
262;
primary identification with 168
mother-child relationship 119
mother-daughter relationship 4, 20,
71, 72, 73, 74, 203
mother-son relationship 23, 120, 133
Nachträglichkeit 18
narcissism:
feminine 8, 43, 46, 75, 137;
male 119, 120;
phallic 46, 104, 132, 140, 145
Oedipal illusions 83, 89
Oedipus complex 2, 3, 25, 32, 43,
234, 236;
female 68;
negative 25, 29, 51, 52, 59, 61, 63;
parental sexuality in 83;
resolution of 69
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 152
orality 187
orgasm 11, 161, 163;
clitoral 182;
vaginal 127, 182n 130,
paranoid-schizoid mode of
functioning 46, 46
parental sexuality in the Oedipus
complex 83
passivity 25, 172, 173;
male fear of 114, 177;
see also activity-passivity polarity
penetration anxiety 194
penis desire 12, 22, 130
penis envy 2, 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14,
22, 68, 73, 76, 99, 99, 101, 102,
115, 123, 130, 137, 138, 147, 175,
177, 199, 206
perversion 215, 220
phallic logic 173, 182n
phallic monism see sexual phallic
monism
phallic narcissism 46, 104, 132, 140, 145
phallic phase 22, 31, 46, 100, 101,
121, 142, 171, 191, 191
phallic shadow 132
phallic woman 283
phallic-narcissistic regression 120
phallocentrism 11, 147
pleasure:
and jouissance 161;
306 THE GENDER CONUNDRUM
precocious 161;
sublimated 162
pleasure principle 132, 143
post-natal depression 74
pre-genital phase see pre-Oedipal phase
pre-Oedipal phase 5, 13, 44, 70, 115;
in men 23, 25
pregnancy, genital anxiety in 204
primary femininity 15, 46
primary homosexuality 35
primary identification 168
proto-phallic phase 101
psychic development and the body 191
psychic trauma 241
psychoanalytic feminism 7
psychobisexuality 34, 35, 170, 178,
179, 236
puberty 63
Ravishment of Lol V Stein (Duras) 157
reality principle 132, 132, 139, 142
regression: and genital anxiety 196;
phallic-narcissistic 120
renunciation of sexuality 199
repression 153, 155, 155, 157, 159,
160, 161, 162, 163
sadism 187, 220
separation-individuation
struggle 195, 203, 206, 207, 260
sexual difference, recognition of 43,
46, 46, 169, 171, 174, 188, 236
sexual education 113
sexual identity 34, 171, 236, 242, 257
sexual impotence 132
sexual knowledge:
of children 110, 113, 236;
instinctive 113
sexual phallic monism 99, 103, 107
passim, 168, 174
sexuality:
and biology 37;
precocious 155;
renunciation of 199;
see also female sexuality;
male sexuality
son-father relationship 25, 29, 49
son-mother relationship 23, 120, 133
structural linguistics 9
sublimation 149, 159, 162
superego:
female 187, 187;
male 51, 61
supplementary jouissance 19
synchronic versus diachronic
perspectives 16
transexuality 121, 260
transference illusion 91
‘transgression beyond sex’ of new
babies 140
transvestitism 260
trauma, psychic 241
triadic father-son relationship 56, 64
unconscious 9;
autonomy of 19;
feminine 22, 149, 158
unconscious representation of
castration 150, 151
urethral excitation 141
urethral sadism 187
vagina 12, 13, 16;
ignorance of 107, 108, 111, 113,
174;
premature recognition of 132, 143;
repression of 103, 104, 114, 148;
unconscious knowledge of 23, 175
vagina envy 25, 138
vagina-man 275
vaginal awareness/sensations 99, 100,
101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 174
vaginal orgasm 127, 182n
womanliness 101